BLINDED BY MY contact lens
The wind was howling as I headed to my car. Just as I passed a building site, a huge gust sent grit right into my face.
Blinking it away, I didn’t think much of it, but that night when I took out my contact lenses, my right eye felt a bit sore.
‘It’s looking really red,’ my colleague said at work the next day.
Over the weekend the pain got so bad I struggled to walk and I started to feel sick.
A doctor said I probably had a cornea infection and prescribed eye drops.
But over the next few days, my vision went blurry and I was so sensitive to light, all I could do was stay in bed in the dark.
‘I think I need to go to hospital,’ I said to my husband Andrew.
There, an eye specialist took one look and knew.
‘I suspect you have acanthamoeba keratitis,’ he told me.
A rare disease, it’s caused by a microscopic organism found in tap water.
The infection eats the cornea – the transparent cover of the eye – and if left to burrow, the amoeba can gnaw right through the eyeball.
The grit must’ve scratched my cornea, I remembered.
Then I probably showered while still wearing my contact lenses.
I’d provided the perfect feeding ground for the parasite – and now it was attacking my eye!
‘We need to start an aggressive treatment regime to kill it,’ the doctor said.
Immediately, I was admitted and toxic drops were used to burn through my cornea.
Every hour, on the hour, a nurse put five drops in my eye a couple of minutes apart.
Being woken throughout the night left me sleep deprived. And as the liquid seared a big hole, it was excruciating.
Slow-release morphine helped for a bit but when it wore off, pain ripped through my jaw and across my head. Crippled by the agony, I rocked back and forward on the bed.
Will I ever work again?
I panicked.
Andrew had recently been made redundant and I was the main breadwinner.
As well as two stepdaughters – Danielle, 19, who was away at uni, and Emma, 16 – Andrew and I had Lily, six.
Free time was spent ferrying the girls to netball practice and I performed with a theatre group.
Now my world had been reduced to a hospital bed and uncertainty.
I look like I’ve got a zombie eye, I thought.
After five days, test results confirmed I did have acanthamoeba keratitis (AK).
A doctor mentioned partial blindness and cornea transplants, but I couldn’t take it all in.
I just had to hope the drops stopped the infection spreading.
One day, I decided to go to the canteen for a coffee. But as I queued, anxiety bubbled inside me.
I only had about 15 minutes before the morphine wore off and sunshine was streaming through the window.
Pain ripped through my jaw and head