Yup, it's THAT bad...

So the picture to the left is bit deceptive, this is not actually MY eye. My eye is much worse. This is a topograph of a person with the same condition I have, just not as severe.

I went to a consultation this morning with TLC to see if I was a candidate for Laser Eye surgery. After some testing they sat me down with a doctor who informed me that I have Keratoconus. It is a condition that affects 1 in 1000 people and basically results in the cornea or lens of the eye getting more and more conical shaped as time goes on. The link to the wikipedia page is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keratoconus and there is a great picture of a guy's eye. It was a bit too gross to put on here so if you want to go look at it you can.

Essentially the topograph above shows that the cornea is largely normal in the upper portion of the eye, but drops off steeply towards the bottom of the lens. The doctors said they like to be able to draw a line across the center of the eye and see about as much color on the top as the bottom. My topograph had virtually no color in the upper portion and a bunch of red and pink in the bottom portion.

The really crappy thing about the condition is that contacts and glasses don't really help the situation as it is the Cornea that is the problem, not the eye itself. So at any rate it looks like there are 3 real options:

1) Continue to wear contacts, but switch to RGP or rigid contacts that would be hard and force the cornea more into shape. This would be a temporary fix and it is likely the cornea will get worse.

2) Implant INTACs into my eye under the cornea. As TLC performs this procedure this is obviously their proposed option. Essentially slits would be made into the cornea and little pieces of plastic would be inserted to stretch the cornea into shape.

3) Ignore the problem in which case my vision will deteriorate further and further until eventually I can barely see out of my right eye and I would need a corneal transplant or as my co-worker so eloquently put it, I would need "dead guy eye" put in.

The third option is very non-appealing to me. To the point where I would almost prefer to not have vision in my right eye. The contact option doesn't sound too bad, but it also sounds like it would be a daily inconvenience.

The second option is still somewhat experimental, but has had good results. So at any rate, I need to do a lot more research, and will probably ask to get a second opinion before I go forward. As my two greatest fears in life are to go blind or to lose my hearing, I am going to put in some serious leg-work before I make a decision on this one.

My boss brought up that because it is an actual condition the INTACs might be covered by insurance, which I will have to look into. The doctor said that with the INTACs AND glasses, they think the could give me close to 20/20 vision in my right eye, which would be a miracle.

At any rate, depressing news, but nothing compared to what others suffer through.