Sunday, April 08, 2007

My Vision

I'm afflicted with a rare, progressive eye disease, called Keratoconus 1. While it doesn't cause blindness, it finally results in very bad vision.

Whenever my eye condition comes up during conversation2, I have a hard time explaining exactly how my vision is affected. However, I recently came across a wonderful site3 which contains a compilation of images, some of which I've used here, designed to help communicate how and what individuals with Keratoconus see.

Currently, I'm experiencing the early stages of the disease only in the right eye, so my overall vision isn't too bad. Although, one major problem is that images appear very blurred at night4. For example, this is how the moon looks through my right eye.



Driving at night is especially a problem, because of the glare and streaking of light from the oncoming traffic.



Also, distant objects are never clear or sharp. This results in me ending up with a big headache if I don't wear my glasses or contacts for an extended period of time.



Footnotes

[1] - Believe me, you DO NOT want to wiki this.

[2] - ie, rarely. Usually, I have much more interesting things to talk about. And no, it's not the weather either. Honest!

[4] - They appear slightly blurred during the day too, if you're interested, which doubtless, you're not.

3 comments:

Mohan K.V said...

Uh, I wikied it anyway, :-( should have listened to you.

Do the glasses help much? Is there any reason why it is blurred more at night than during the day?

Santhosh Suresh said...

So did I, :-(.

Siddharth said...

The glasses do help a lot. Vision with contacts is almost perfect, although they are very irritating to wear.

I don't know why it's blurred at night, but I have a hypothesis. During day time, I think that my brain is able to "filter" images, using the light around the object as feedback. However,at night, when I look at an object like the moon, there's no light around it allow for correction, so it appears blurred with multiple images.