pointy like my eyeball

topography was yesterday and it’s official, i have Keratoconus, or KC as it’s commonly abbreviated.  so the funness comes in here in that i went in for an eye exam, expecting a prescription, on the day my medical benefits from albertsons’ went buh-bye, and now i’ve got a eye condition that needs treatment with no insurance, and it won’t kick in with whole foods until i’ve worked 400 hours.  and seeing as how it sounds like the type of shifts they want me to work will be night shifts, getting contacts is important asap.  plus, i’d like to see.

the more i look at the pictures of the pointy KC eyeballs, like on the wiki article,  the less freaked out by them i am, and i’m forcing myself to come to terms with the contact lens thing.  i’m gonna have to get used to stuff whether i like it or not.  of course, we just watched an episode of deadwood the other night in which one guy popped the other guy’s eyeball out of its’ socket in a brawl, and he’s screaming, and the eyeball is dangling, and it was still pretty disturbing.  erin was laughing at my squeamishness — which, usually, goes the other way around — because she’s seen that exact thing on animals before working at the humane society.  even though it was late, i made us watch the whole episode because i didn’t want to go to bed thinking about eyeball popping out of its socket.

the guy who did the topography didn’t say how “bad” my KC was, just that i had it.  but i’ve found a couple of good sites that i del.icio.us‘d, one that has user-submitted photographs artificially (read: photoshopped) to look like various degrees of severity of KC, and i’m certainly not the worst.  i’m actually more on the lower end of the spectrum in terms of how i see.  more than anything else, i feel relieved that i’m not just totally insane and making this shit up because that’s how i’ve felt sometimes since it’s not like i don’t see clearly.  i do see clearly, but there’s other stuff, interference, in the way, shadows and ghosts and flares and things that make it hard to make out certain types of things even though my vision is more or less okay.

so i didn’t really go into what KC was in my last post, i just pointed to the wiki.  what it is is a conical formation of the cornea caused by thinning of the tissue there.  various factors and theories exist as to why the tissue thins, but chronic eye rubbing doesn’t help.  and according to some further research i’ve done, there is no real direct link to heredity — there are numerous cases of multiple members of families having it, but researchers haven’t been able to specifically attribute it to genetics.  so conical formation of the cornea — in english it means your eye gets pointy, and if you see pictures on the web of KC, you’ll know just how pointy.  i’m gonna make erin take a picture of my pointy eyeballs so i know wtf they look like so i can sort of compare with the horrible extreme-o-pictures i’ve found on the web.

normally, when your eye is more or less spherical, the light comes in, angles to a common point of reference, and projects on the back of your eyeball which gets translated by your brain and that’s how you see.  if your eye is an irregular shape, say more oval than round, then you see double images, and that’s astigmatism.  when your eyeball is pointy, the light comes in at crazy angles, and bounces all over the place inside your eyeball.  naturally, the image they produce is gonna be wacky, and have stuff all over the place.  most of the pictures i found on KCVision are way worse than how i see.  my eyeball is slightly more pointy down and slightly left of my pupil.  so some of the light comes in and bounces high and right on the back of my eyeball.  images appear upside down when they’re projected on your eyeball and your brain flips them right-side up, so how i see is the normal image anyone with good eyesight would see, and then a duzzy and light 2nd image below and to the left of that.  as i said before my left eye is shot — i have KC worse in that eye than my right — and also, the location of the pointy-ness is different.  so that means i have at least two shadows although i think i really see out of my right eye most of the time, because when i try to look out of my left i, everything’s fuzzy, and it’s not just the KC i don’t think.  maybe it is.  i dunno.  but i see crappy when i just try to look out of my right eye too.  and when my eyes are split, like through binoculars or the new eye exam at the DMV where you have to look through a thing instead of just read the letters off the back wall, or other optometrist exams where you’re looking through a thing at a light or a picture, it exaggerates and intensifies the effects of the KC so that i can’t really see whatever it is that i’m supposed to be looking at.

so this leads into the fact that today is my first real day working at WF.  my manager, or team lead as WF referrs to them, said that his mornings and mids are pretty much covered.  which leaves nights and closing, and i really don’t want to be making that drive down the mountains at night with this.  well-lit roads are one thing, horrible and distracting but better than non-lit highways with lots of headlights coming in the opposite direction.  to make my timing even more perfect, today when i woke up it had snowed last night and was the first time it really stuck to the roads. it’s the 2nd snow, but the first wasn’t really all that heavy.  so now there’s that too.  which all leads me to want to get the KC taken care of, or at least under control, whether i have insurance or not, because it’s going to be really bad without.