Tuesday, June 5, 2007

What is wrong with this country

So, I have keratoconus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keratoconus). It means that I am unable to get 20/20 vision from glasses. I need gas permable contacts in order to have something hold my eyes to a shape which allows me to see. This means two things. The first is that over time, my eyes change shape. The second is that because the contacts hold my eyes to a specific shape, any time you change the contact, the shape of my eye will change. Both shape changes are unpredictable.

Therefore, contact fittings are moving targets. Like trying to fit a tight fitting dress to a woman who is losing weight at an unpredictable rate for an unspecified time in the future. In fact, it's a lot like that.

Every year I visit an eye doctor who makes a topological map of my eyes. It would seem the simplest thing to use a software product to model contacts on the map of my eye and figure out the best fit for the new shape, also you could use the same setup to predict shape changes depending on the contact shape. However, this software does not exist.

Instead my contact doctor (yes, that's right, it's a different doctor) guesses. I grant you it is an educated guess, but it is still a guess. We'll change the slope to this degree, the edges to that degree. The diameter with be this and the color will be that. Then it comes in and we look at how it works with my eye. Then I come back and he looks at it again in a few weeks, after my eye has changed shape. I'm on the third revision of this, this year. It gets harder, the worse my eyes get.

The reason the software doesn't exist is

1. Doctors don't talk to software developers
2. Because keratoconus is fairly rare, it isn't profitable to develop this software, which would be costly for SO many reasons.

What really kills me is the modeling software, at some level, must exist. Contact vendors have standard shapes and sizes that they cut off a cylinder of plastic, so they must, at the very least, feed the machine various contact shapes.

This sucks.