Friday, October 17, 2008

Corneal Reshaping - Post #5: Final Chapter

When last I wrote on this topic, I was quite optimistic. My second pair of "ZWave" CRT lenses worked quite well. Well, not quite well enough. I was seeing nicely at the end of the first week but still getting double vision and blurriness at night. I hoped it would go away, but the eyeball topo maps (a rather cool technology) suggested otherwise: Like the first pair, these were slipping up while I slept and not centering over my corneas.

The doctor gave me a third pair, these from a different company. They were worse.

I decided to play it safe and go back to glasses for the weekend, hoping I'd have more reliable vision for my trip to Pueblo and back. Sadly, the lenses had made me farsighted. So when the guys at the Pueblo church turned down the lights for my PowerPoint, I could hardly read my 28 pages of speaking notes. Uh oh...

Apparently my corneas are too irrepressible, unshapable!

Today's verdict, after an appointment with the doctor: I'll have to go back to (regular, daytime) hard lenses. Darn it. In a day or two I should be fully back to my usual level of nearsightedness and able to bop around town confidently in my trusty old glasses while waiting for a fresh pair of old-fashioned contacts (and a hefty refund check) to arrive by the end of the week.

I still think corneal reshaping is a great idea and would recommend it to others, even if it didn't work for me. And as I said in a recent discussion with a friend...

Truly, it is amazing what they can do these days! In other times (or places) I'd just be blind(-ish). Or go through my life with "weak eyes" like Leah in the book of Genesis.

(Though, in that story, you'd think Jacob could have used some corrective lenses as well, eh? His night vision was apparently not what it could have been.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry to hear that this didn't work out for you, Marti. And you should also be very cautious about anything 'radical' like corneal radiometery. We wouldn't want to do anything to risk our one-eyedness!

I have also discovered that my body just loves to make lots of scar tissue. My hand is not yet healed--4 months after the injury. My thumb has become a mass of scar tissue, very tender. My finger is still numb and very cold sensitive. It'll be a long winter. I guess I'll write that book (with 9 fingers, maybe that'd be a good title).

Marti said...

Don't worry, I won't do anything "radical" on that front! A lot to lose. The beauty of CRT was that it is completely reversible and involved no surgery. So, already this morning I seem back to normal.

Sorry your hand is still a mess! [Dad cut off his index finger and the end of his thumb in an accident. They thought the finger would require amputation but managed to save it.]

Hope Jennie's well... haven't talked to you guys in quite a while. Will try to give you a call. Just learned that Deb had changed our phone plan to include "free" [flat rate, unlimited] long distance.

I've been badly stuck on several things that are very important to me at work, partly due to some phone calls I can't bring myself to make. It's really quite ridiculous, and I hate how ridiculous I feel for not being able to do it, and then it spirals down from there. Getting to the point where instead of expressing patience or frustration with me, my long-distance colleagues have moved out to expressing concern for me, and that may be what it needs to break through.