Real Patients: Refractive Errors


Real Patients
My eye history starts back in kindergarten. My parents realized that I had some struggles because in school I was missing a lot of what was written on the blackboard.

At the age of twelve maybe is when my eyes, my eyesight started to kind of fade.

I was nearsighted so I couldn’t see anything that you know, I could touch flat handed. I couldn’t see anything past that. It was all blurry. It was you know, like looking through some foggy goggles.

A typical day, a majority of it I would not be able to see certain things at a distance. And I wasn’t a big fan of glasses. So a lot of times I would just go without and squint most of the time.

I never wore glasses before. Not as a child. And then as soon as I joined the Air Force, I was working behind a computer all day, everyday. And so my vision started to decrease slowly but surely.

And originally I only had to wear glasses in the classroom and then at home watching TV. And eventually that progressed to a point where I was wearing glasses full-time.

I’ve had glasses since I was, I think second grade. I’ve always had eye issues. Never been able to see.

First of all I’ve been wearing contact lenses and glasses since I was eleven years old.

And then I started wearing contacts and I wore contacts all the way, everyday through college.

Wearing contact lenses, you have to be very clean. You have to make sure your hands are washed before you touch your eyeball. And say you’re staying up late, working on a project in high school and you fall asleep. If you fall asleep in your contact lenses you can wake up to a really serious eye infection.

They did work for a little while. But I just noticed a lot of debris got in them. And they’re very itchy, irritated. And I feel like I had to carry drops with me everywhere I go.

Going through the process of ordering contacts. And making sure I had enough to get me through the year until my insurance came up again.

When I lost insurance with my, under my father I was no longer able to afford the contacts.

So it always made it a little tricky to try to always make sure I had enough contacts with me traveling, and camping, and yeah. It was difficult.

It affected my life with mainly sports. Wasn’t able to see or when I wore a football helmet, I had to take my glasses off until I got to an older age where I could wear contacts. And whenever I started wearing contacts I was wrestling a lot. So, they were always falling out and it was a major issue growing up.

I actually grew up as an athlete. I was a cheerleader. So a lot of times during football games, I would actually have to take my contacts or my glasses off.

If I was running in cold weather, my glasses would fog up. And I couldn’t really see where I was running. I just knew I was running.

Having fog on my lenses while I was out deployed in CENTCOM, really affected everything I was doing when it came to the mission. I mean, walking outside it fogged up. I couldn’t see anything. I took my glasses off, couldn’t see anything because I’m nearsighted. I was seeing twenty-four hundred in each eye. So I had a really difficult time. So the only time I was able to actually do my mission is if I’m inside and there’s no humidity. And the environment that I was actually in that was nearly impossible.

Finally I was like this is too, this is too much. It’s hard to maintain going to the doctor all the time, getting a new prescription. So that’s why surgery was the best option for me.