After 2 years of trying to get opticians to listen to me, I am finally on the waitlist for surgery!
I had corrective surgery as a child for strabismus (UK, NHS) and at the time they did say it could last upto 20 years, this was about 19 years ago. Around 2 years ago I had an extremely stressful period (lost my job and a close family member, who I cared for in their final stages of a brain tumour, whilst also managing an alcoholic father..). Since then I’d like to say life has got less stressful but it hasn’t, between housing issues, family issues, relationship issues and work I’ve felt incredibly overwhelmed all of the time, even with the smallest tasks. I did flag in December 2024 that I felt it had returned, and I was told my prescription was wrong and this was causing the issue, I then flagged this to 2 more opticians and got told the same thing. I would get my prescription changed, it would correct it for a little bit, and then it would return.
Finally in January of this year I got a referral back to Moorfields Eye hospital in London, where I originally had surgery. The optician that referred me even told me he felt it wasn’t the case, but would do so on my request. It took 5 months to get an appointment after the referral, which took 10 minutes for them to assess me and say it has very clearly returned and they are putting me in for surgery ASAP (2-3 months left on the waitlist). They will be operating on my right eye this time.
I’ve found it has impacted a LOT of my life more than I realised - general fatigue is the absolute worse for me. I do a lot of screen heavy work with spreadsheets and other focus work, that is causing major migraines by the end of the work day and complete overwhelm continuously. We have also been hit by heatwaves in the UK that have massively impacted my sleep and in turn caused a lot of further stress and anxiety, that makes my eyes worse.
Luckily my work have been understanding and next week are looking at adjusted hours and support until I get surgery - I’m really hopeful that this will improve my life massively as I didn’t really notice a general mood difference when I was younger, except more confidence - but as an adult I’m really hoping this will be life changing from an energy and pain perspective.