Hi I am Lisa from Newfoundland, Canada.

I always had trouble with my eyes.  Back when I was 2 I had eye surgery for a turn in my eyes.  From then till I was 28 I was getting my glasses changed on a yearly basis.  Then in 2004 my eye Doctor said my corneas seem a little cone shaped.  I didn’t want to accept that there was something else wrong with my eyes.  So I ignored it and changed eye doctors and I didn’t like her bedside manner or shall I say lack of.  Never went back to an eye Doctor until in 2006 when he said my turn in my eye had now caused me to have ‘lazy eye’ as I couldn’t see the eye chart at all with it even with correction.  This went on until 2010 when I went for another check up and the best he could make my good eye was 20/40 with glasses.

He was stumped by that and said ‘I want to do another test on you’. So he did and said then ‘I am going to send you to a eye surgeon as I think you have an eye disease called keratoconus’.  Had to wait til may 2011 to see that Doctor and when I did they did a lot of testing on my eyes and said ‘yes you do have keratoconus’ and ‘sometimes it stops progressing so come back in 9 months and see how things are’.

In the 9 months between visits I began to get daily headaches and shadows in my vision got worse.  When I went back in Feb. 2012 and they did the testing again and said ‘yes it has progressed’ and said I would need corneal cross linking in both eyes and after it healed I would need RGP contacts.  But he said he doesn’t do cxl so he sent me to another surgeon.  I had to wait six weeks to see that one.  When I did he said yes you have advanced keratoconus in both eyes, and I was just at the cut off point for cxl collagen cross linking.  I had the cxl collagen cross linking with PRK in June 2012.  I ended up having complications from it such as severe hazing and delayed healing.

By the end of September most of the hazing was gone and I was then able to go and get fitted for the RGP contacts.  That was an adventure in itself. I have had lots of retweaking of my lenses in the past six months.  My fitter is still not happy with the fit as they are riding a bit low on my eye.  But the vision with them is 20/30 and if I wear glasses it’s 20/80 – so a big difference.

I go back for my yearly check up in June – hopefully there is no more progression!