Hi! I am Rae, a 40 something female from Brighton in the UK. This is my story, about living with keratoconus. I had had dodgy eyesight since I was about 18 and was able to wear glasses and then soft contact lens. I found out that I had astigmatism later on and wore a toric lens in my left eye to correct this. Pretty standard stuff really.
Like many I had never heard of this weird eye disease, until that fateful day that I was in Specsavers about 8 years ago, getting some new glasses AGAIN and the optician simply said- ‘I don’t know what’s wrong but I think you should see a specialist’. What? This was a shocker. Didn’t see that coming (literally).

He said he could not improve on the vision I had with either specs or soft contacts anymore, and he said I had had too many new pairs and changes in 18 months for this to be considered normal. I had been wearing both for some 10 years, and recently had noticed my vision was just getting worse and worse, getting frustrated with eye pain, and not being able to DO STUFF I wanted to do easily. Things were blurry, my eyes were tired, and it was such a pain in the arse. So I left the store and booked an appointment with my GP. Luckily I have a great GP and he knows me well. He sent me to a local eye hospital to see an optometrist and so my journey with keratoconus began. Initially I was prescribed hard RGP contact lens- which remain the staple of many a KC’ers life, and are prescribed the world over- as they offer great vision. It took a few goes, but eventually my left eye had an RGP lens that worked and my right had a new soft lens. Bit weird adjusting to this to begin with, problems with depth perception and so on, never ask me to pour a glass of wine! But the vision was OK and once I was used to wearing these new lens it was doable. That was it, me done, sorted.

Or so I thought……………….