A year and a half ago I promised several folks I'd keep them posted on the results of my cornea transplant. It's not that I forgot about it, it just that it took this long to have anything definite to report.

I had a LASIK in one eye only in June, 1996. About a year later vision started getting worse, and the eye became painful. Vision and pain both became progressively worse as time went on. I was diagnosed with dry eye, then with irregular astigmatism. Finally in 2002 the doctors figured out I had ectasia, or kerataconus, that was going to keep getting worse, and I needed a cornea transplant.

I had a cornea transplant in May, 2002. It took a full year before there was much improvement. Today, 18 months later, the stitches are still in. Vision varies quite a bit, sometimes functional vision in that eye seems very good, sometimes I'm running on the other eye only, sometimes it's somewhere in between. On the eye chart I vary from 20/70 to 20/100 uncorrected, but functional vision seems to vary a lot more than that. When things are good I feel like I can read a lot better than 20/70, when they're bad I feel worse than 20/100.

The surgeon hasn't made any attempt to fit me with glasses or contacts yet, because vision is still too variable.

Am I better off now than I was before the transplant? Yes, definitely. I get some useful vision out of that eye most of the time. And it hurt, a lot, almost all the time, before the operation. Except for my eyedrop schedule I can function normally now. In fact, it's only in the last few months that I realized how disabled I had become before the transplant.

On the other hand, the transplant hasn't helped the LASIK-induced dry eye. I'm on Restasis and TheraTears and ointment (and anti-rejection drops). The dryness got a lot worse when the weather got cold and I turned the heat on, even though air-conditioning in the summer didn't have that effect. I'm not sure why that is.

Should you have a transplant? In my case I didn't have a whole lot of choice. In fact I should have had it a lot sooner than I did. If you are going to have a transplant, two words of advice:

1. Interview several surgeons beforehand, don't be afraid to ask questions, be sure you are comfortable with that doctor. You're going to be seeing a lot of each other.

2. Be patient. I think I set a new world's slowness record, you'll probably heal faster than I did, but you're not going to heal overnight.

Mike

Michael Knee

Mike,

Thanks for this update and for your continued input to the bulletin board.

David Hartzok, OD, FAAO
Executive Director
The Surgical Eyes Foundation