Late one night in my first year of studying Economics at the University of Sydney, I noticed that my right eye had much worse vision than my left.  I held a hand over one eye, then the other, and realised that the difference was significant.  I decided to go to bed and check again in the morning.  When I woke, the first thing I did was check my eyes.  The result was the same as the prior evening.  I went to see an optometrist, then a specialist, and was diagnosed with Keratoconus.  The year was 1986.

At the time of my diagnosis, treatments were far inferior to where they are today. I tried a hard lens that felt impossible to wear at first.  But, after persistence and determination my eyes started to adjust. I got by for a number of years before deciding to have a corneal transplant in about 1999.  The surgery took 3 hours and I was in hospital for 8 days.  My eyesight didn’t improve as much as I had hoped.  I had a number of follow on surgeries to adjust stitching, use lasers etc, but the vision never really got to a point at which I could stop wearing hard contact lenses.  By this stage I was now also wearing a lens in my left eye.

My left eye lens is every day and my right eye on and off depending on how I am feeling.  But my vision is good enough to drive, work, play golf, and live a normal life without drugs, without more surgery, and without any real impact on my life. Eventually, I was offered a transplant for my left eye, but I declined.