The diagnosis is Keratoconus. Incurable, degenerative eye disease that causes blurry vision. Essentially the collagen in your cornea begins to degrade and lose its strength, allowing the internal pressure in your eye to push the cornea out of shape, thereby distorting your vision. So things in my right eye are blurry and doubled. And they aren't going to get better. (But hard contact lenses may help.) US medicine doesn't really do Keratoconus treatment (yet), and most insurance companies see it as elective, not required. Europe has been treating it with well-documented success in their basic medical plans for decades. There are only about 200,000 cases a year, and fortunately one of the leading lights in this area of research and treatment is here in Seattle, and she is affiliated with my regular eye doctor. So I grabbed her next available appointment... at the end of MAY. So right now I am going through the Seven Stages, and have arrived at Pissed Off Grumpy Motherfucker Who Loves His Job and Desperately Need His Vision To Keep Doing It, stage. I hope to power through that stage, and get on to "dealing with it" soon... any minute now... <drums fingers on desk>...
Holy crap that's pretty grim. Is it only your right eye? Any chance you could marry a Canadian? My mom lost vision in the right eye couple years ago, when its optic nerve got squished by the growing tumours in her brain. We has low key been panicking about what happens when it squishes her remaining eye, but she had a stroke last week and so maybe she might not live for that to be an issue. Sorry that was irrelevant. Just wanted to say, yeah sometimes stuff just sucks so bad. I hope you find an affordable cure. That sounds so disgusting to even type.
Things have changed, since I posted that. Most of those changes have been in my head. First off, a week after changing to the new prismatic-lensed glasses, I accidentally picked up my old glasses and put them on one morning... and it was BLISSFUL. I felt RELIEF. That was when I realized that there was a lot of stuff going on in my head that had nothing to do with the actual physical condition of my eyes. The prismatic lenses in my new glasses were just weird. I realized that I never got used to them, and having my vision be "odd" all the time, was deeply tiring/unsettling. When I switched back to my old glasses - with the too-weak, too-old prescription - I felt RELIEF. I relaxed. I re-evaluated my ACTUAL ABILITY TO SEE, and didn't think about my initial diagnosis of Keratoconus, and instead... just looked out my actual eyes, at my surroundings, and thought, "hey... that's not so bad." So. I went back to my eye doctor and told her how relieving it was to put on my old glasses, and told her about the diagnosis. She suggested I stick with my old glasses now. Then go see the specialist to get the Keratoconus diagnosis confirmed/denied. Then, see what course of treatment the doc suggests. At that point - less than 90 days from when I got my new glasses - we can decide how to proceed with my new glasses. Stick with them? Change the prescription? And even possibly change to hard contact lenses. (One possible solution to Keratoconus, that works for some people.) So yeah. I still have blurry/weird vision in my right eye. But my left eye has become dominant, so I don't even notice the right eye blur anymore. My old glasses are not the perfect prescription, but they are fine for everyday use. So I am in a MUCH better place, right now. This holding pattern kinda works for me... for the time being...