Member-only story
My Eyes Are Traitors
How an epic battle for my vision culminated in the worst two months of my life
My body is not a wonderland. It is a battleground. As I’ve gotten older, the threats have increased—high blood pressure, increasingly wonky knees, the psychological warfare of thinning hair—but nothing hates me more than my eyes. They have tried to destroy me for years, and last December, they nearly succeeded.
I have been nearsighted almost my entire life, but in 2014, after years of frustrating eye appointments that never managed to help me see clearly, an ophthalmologist diagnosed me with keratoconus. It’s a progressive eye disease in which the cornea sags, distorting vision; for example, one line of text looks to me like five or six, all jumbled on top of each other.
Keratoconus usually stops progressing before you’re 40, but mine did not. I had my first cornea transplant in my right eye last June, which then kicked off a fast-growing cataract—that’s where the lens in your eye begins to cloud over, diffusing clarity and fading colors. Within a few months, the vision in my right eye was worse than it had been before the surgery.
Since my cornea was still healing, my ophthalmologist decided to hold off on cataract removal. That made sense to me; besides, I could still see “okay” out of my left eye. I couldn’t read anything that wasn’t in large print, but I could still write my column “Nerd Processor.” Still, by November, I was having a very difficult time reading anything on my computer screen—no matter how large I made the font.
It was tough. And as it turned out, it was only a prologue.
In early December, flashes began to appear before my left eye. They were actually kind of pretty, but by then, anything unusual regarding my vision made me anxious. A quick internet search told me these flashes often presage a retinal detachment. I went to a local ophthalmologist and expected the worst.
I was pleasantly surprised when she told me she saw no problems, though she did tell me to be vigilant for other signs. Like the one where a dark cloud appears in the upper corner of your eyesight, another sign of retinal detachment. Mine appeared the following Monday.
