Enl(eye)tening

Well It's been like a week so I'm going to put up a new post. This one isn't japan related but I love a pun, possibly more than most, and this post is a tribute to my gammy eyes. For years I've had a weak left eye but I've just kind of got on with it. My vision wasn't great but it was managible so I just ignored it, silly  I know but I think thats how I work most of the time, I'm very much just  shut up and get on with it, something I'm almost certain I get from you dad :P.

Anyway a bit of background and some tasty tasty eye gore, you have been warned. So whats wrong with me. I have a condition known as Keratoconus (no not Kerry Catonus although i thought that was what the optician told me first time around). What this basically means is that the corneas of my eyes are cone shaped rather than rounded and so incident light is not refracted onto my retina properly, everything seems to be about the diffraction, refraction or reflection of photons of light with me at the mo.




Right so now a bit of a sciency bit. The treatment for this is to remove the top layer of cells from the cornea, they're dead anyway so it;s actually fairly straightforward. My eye was anesthetized and then washed with alcohol. I did have to watch it being scraped off though, that wasn't much fun :(. After that I had to lie still for 1 hour as drops of riboflavin were added to my eye every 5 minutes. The idead is that the riboflavin (or vitamin B2) will be used to cross link the keratin in the cornea, making it more rigid and so flattening and thickening it. Then hopefully normalish vision yay.

Of course you scrape off a load of cells from your eye it's like having a graze on your eyeball. Suffice to say I'm currently suffering alot of Itami no meh. It is a bit frustrating. I had the operation done on monday, can;t see anything out of my left eye of course and it;s a bit of a fight to keep my right eye open.

I can't really read, watch T.V. r do much of anything really. I'm able to right this post simply on the virtue that I don't really need to look at the keys. It's worth it in the long run though. It's funny in a way because I;d never have found out about this if it wasn't for frisbee. A couple of my mates noticed I always seemed to drop discs when they were on my left side and maybe I needed an eye test. I brushed it off the first couple of times but eventually went and pow. I could have gone blind if not for frisbee, what an awesome sport ey. Anyway time to go take it easy (whatever that means).