In the first attempt at writing a bio for this site, I realized that I couldn’t stop. I realized this when, midway through the 3rd page of my "short" bio for the site, I was only a few weeks away from my RK in late 1992. It is impossible to convey the pain, frustration, loneliness, queasiness, and despair of seven years of adulterated, fluctuating vision unless you have seven years to listen. Because almost every single minute, I deal, and have had to deal, with the peculiarities of my vision since my RK. Almost every single minute, there is a challenge to overcome to see what I am doing clearly. Almost every single minute, I am thinking at some level of what I need to do in order to be able to see things better. Typing this involves fiddling constantly with the contrast of this monitor, taking glasses on and off, tilting them this way and that, turning the reading light nearby on and off, and so forth. What seems to work a little better one moment is no good the next. The tension at the back of my head and the fatigue are constant, although I’m neither presbyopic nor latently hyperopic and what they can measure of my regular astigmatism is rather small. If I have to go into an area with dimmer light- let’s say, out into the hallway here- my world is thrown into instant angst, trying to see people’s faces as they’re blocked out by light scatter from the background; wondering where the edges of objects are for sure as the ghost images of lighter objects hover and transgress boundaries of darker ones; recognizing back-lit objects only by movement. On and on, just to walk down the hall…

So go most phases of the normal routine of daily life. The degree of frustration and panic varies directly with visual aberration. Driving at dusk anywhere or at night in unfamiliar places is sheer, palm-sweating terror. There’s lots more weird stuff. I have never gotten used to or prepared for these visual effects when they happen, but they still happen all the time in the course of a normal day. There’s no relief. The best analogy I can think of is antenna-reception TV with something on you really want to watch, but you just can’t get rid of the ghost images and distortion no matter how much you adjust the antennas. So, I can still see life and make out a lot of what’s going on, but it’s really hard to enjoy as much. And of course there are other consequences in life too when you can’t see as well, such as being less productive, driving into curbs, not being able to pursue a career, etc. I know about these too.

If you’re here at this site, you may understand all this. You may understand, too, how isolated, crazy, and desperate I felt at times as I tried to live with this. How I tried so hard to play this off as miraculous success to friends and family, discreetly switching eyeglass lenses back and forth in the three pairs of similar frames I had. Altering my own eyeglass prescription because there was no doctor available and I knew I was becoming too nearsighted or farsighted to function- has anyone else had to do that? How I struggled to make the best of things and participate in my own care, travelling hundreds of miles and spending thousands of dollars to see different specialists and "work" with them on my case. How I felt like I was the only God-forsaken refractive surgical mishap in at least the eastern United States. It wasn’t until I saw a specialist on the other side of the country- one who did not perform refractive surgery!- that I learned I’d been left with an optical zone size so small it virtually sealed my fate of glare, fluctuation, and distortion from the moment the knife sunk into my eye. The contraindications were right there in the medical literature, documented, all along. Shouldn’t one of these guys told me that sooner? At least I could have had peace of mind and understanding, if not a legal prayer under the statute of limitations.

Yet I am a refractive surgery "success", apparently. I can read the 20/40 line or better all the time without my glasses or contact lenses on. A lot of times, especially on really high-contrast eye charts, even better- to 20/25+ sometimes, with nothing at all! I hear effusive praise all the time in eye doctors’ offices when I can do this. Even when my vision was fluctuating unpredictably by as much as 4.5 (at least what was measurable) diopters a day, I’ve always heard how much better off I was, and how happy I must be when I was in a refractive surgeon’s office.

Since I have connected with other people and found out how remarkably similar their visual and emotional experiences have been to mine following refractive surgery- regardless of the type, I have finally begun to accept this chronic condition. I am accepting it, I guess, like most who receive handicaps and decide to move on with life do- as a part of yourself you just deal with and by concentrating on what you can do, not what you can’t. It’s hard to say for sure if this is the way to go, because I’ve never had any other sort of handicap. I do know for sure that I am not accepting what happened to me and thousands of others as an acceptable accident. There are too many of us out here now for too long that need and deserve focused attention and commitment to finding solutions to our problems by those who caused them. It’s my sincere hope that Surgical Eyes™ will help bring these things about and provide a haven where those like us are acknowledged and assisted in the search for better vision.

Brian Sharer