One year ago, I was in an incredibly odd place. For the first time, I had two eye surgeries for my kerataconus — which ultimately ended up causing extreme thinning of my corneas. And a year later, I’d say that for my health, the surgery was worth it only because otherwise, I would’ve needed full corneal transplants. Most folks believe that if someone is wearing glasses or if they get eye surgery, then suddenly all the problems are gone. But my story shows that this couldn’t be further from the truth. If anything, my life got immensely more complex.
If you search Youtube for videos on how people with kerataconus see, you’ll get a visual understanding of what it’s like. That doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface though.
For around the last 15 years or so, I’ve been legally blind. That means that even with corrective lenses, I can’t see to around 20/60. With that said, I can no longer drive and I haven’t been able to for years. It’s one of the reasons why I still live in NYC — though as a I get older, I sometimes look to places in Europe or Asia where the government seems to care more about their citizens and provide critical infrastructure to support them.
The surgeries I had were called corneal cross-linking. Some folks have the support system to be able to do both eyes at a time. And that support system includes close family, a romantic partner, etc. I, however, grew up in a very broken home — and to me, family is the close groups of friends that I have. For the first surgery, my father came to help me for a bit. This was the easier of the two. The second surgery was some of the worst pain I’d ever experience, and a friend helped me only for just a few hours. If I hadn’t been a yogi and meditated for years, I probably would’ve fallen into a very dark place emotionally because I lack that support that so many people otherwise just take advantage of.
Corneal crosslinking made my eyes stable enough to be able to wear specially made contact lenses where the outside is plastic and the inner center is made of glass. They’re intense.
But that is the understatement of the year.
People around me were excited that I’d be able to see, but they didn’t even begin to comprehend how things had changed. At 38 years of age and with legal blindness for almost half my life, I’ve learned to navigate the world mostly without using my eyesight. Now suddently, my visual cortex and mind are overwhelmed. Originally, I didn’t even have the brain power to be able to do lots of the things I could. Literally, I got dumber. Where blind Chris can react to things and walk through my own duplex with ease, sighted Chris moved slowly and even paused to do things like go down the stairs.
At least in my home, I can control thing a bit more. When I go out into the world, things are far more chaotic.
When you’re blind, your other senses compensate to assist you. In my case, the other senses were still highly acute, and now my brain had to deal with that, needing to be super smart, and being able to see.
I haven’t even gotten to how uncomfortable and odd using the contact lenses are either. Throughout the year or so that I’ve been wearing them, my whole process of using them has changed. When a friend asked me a question about this, I quite literally needed to tell her to calm down, relax, and listen to everything I said. Otherwise, she wouldn’t understand.
The process goes like this:
- Look at the case for my contacts
- Open the case up for each contact lens, carefully dump the solution out, and pour new solution in
- Close the case up
- Shake the hell out of the case to clean the contacts
- If I haven’t worn the contacts in more than a week, then they go into a deep cleaning machine which can take up to six hours to fully clean them.
- If I’ve worn them within the past few days, I continue with the process
- Using a paper towel, I pour rosewater onto it and wipe down my eye lids and the area around my eyes. Sometimes, stuff from my eyes can end up on the contact lenses.
- Pat dry my eyes
- Take a contact lens, put it on a plunger
- Observe how clean the contact lens is
- Possibly clean it more by putting it in my palm and then gently rubbing it with contact lens cleaning solution
- Fill the lens up with saline
- Hold my eye open
- Look into the middle of the lens as I put the lens on
- Blink blink blink
- Deal with the fact that there are probably floaters and other oddities that don’t let me see fully clearly
- Continue on with the second eye
- Hope that I can go for 7 hours or so while wearing the contact lenses
“This sounds like a fucking project,” my dear friend, Anouche, said to me.
“Yeah, no kidding.”
Most of the time, I’ve ended up only wearing the contact lenses to photograph birds and sometimes to edit and write for the Phoblographer. If I wear them when going to work out, they irritate me. When I wear them while simply just taking a walk of a few miles, they’ll annoy me too.
When the contacts bother me, I’ll usually need to take them out, deal with the sensory rebound, clean them to a point where they’ll be comfortable, fill them up with solution, and then put them on again.
It has never, ever been comfortable. I’ve always needed to bring a contact lens case, saline, contact lens solution, and the plunger with me. I also bring lots of Refresh Tears eye drops.
My standard is to mostly just wear glasses and adapt to the world with a whole lot of eyedrops.
So in the end, this was only worth it because it prevented me from needing more critical eye surgery. And I ended up more or less functioning in the exact same way I used to. However, I have the option of going between the sighted and blind world a whole lot better. After over a decade of my life of being blind though, I’m quite content with how things work. These days, I’m embracing it in my photography and clients want to hire me for it.
The problem wasn’t that I was blind. It’s that I was trying to shoot like everyone else.