Hi again,

It´s been a month since my corneal ulcer started and I don´t have any pain in my eye. The infection has totally gone away, and I can be outside wearing normal sunglasses. My vision is still very bad, but it fluctuates a lot. Sometimes I can see pretty well when I´m indoors, and other times I see very badly. Outside, most of the time my vision is very bad, and I wouldn´t dare driving a car in my current state. I do ride my bicycle though, although I must say it scares me a bit because I see very badly out of my right eye.

I have been seen by seven different eye doctors thanks to the amazing Spanish health system (seriously, it couldn´t be better and it´s for free) and all of them agree that the scar the ulcer will leave in my eye will be pretty bad. All of them say the same: probably the scar will fade away with time, and my vision will improve. But just probably...I don´t even want to know what are the other posibilities.

At the moment I´m seeing my eye doctor once a week, and I´m having vancomicin, optacilox and FML drops every six hours.

I have talked to my doctor about getting phototherapeutic keratectomy (PTK) in the future, and she says I will have to wait for a long time (around a year) for my eye to completely stable. Luckily the Spanish health system provides this treatment free of charge, but apparently I will have to be taken to a hospital in another city, because they don´t do it in Burgos, the place where I live. Well, at least there is hope my condition will get better in the future. 

I have read most people suffering from this condition end up suffering from very bad depression. Believe me, I won´t. I have decided I will leave with this for as long as it takes, and I won´t be one of the depressed ones. Having loss my vision is bad enough to also lose my mind. 

I will be keeping you post guys in the next weeks.

Hi everybody,

My name is Iván and I´m a Spanish guy who is currently suffering a really nasty central corneal ulcer.

My ordeal started the 28 of August while I was travelling with my girlfriend in Laos when my eye started to get swollen after a van trip. I´m a contact lens wearer so at first I though it was just a bad case of conjuntivitis. After a day suffering from terrible pain and vision loss I visited a doctor in Laos, who told me I should put some drops in my eye (corticoids) and wait for the pain to go away. I did, but my eye got worse and my girlfriend and I decided to call our insurance and ask them to look for a proper doctor to have a look at my eye. The "doctor" who I had seen was a woman dressed in traditional Lao clothes and who appeared at the surgery carrying a bunch of spring onions. At least she washed her hands before inspecting my eye. Well, I was in the Four thousand Islands, and I couldn´t expect to get anything better.

After contacting my insurance (luckily I had paid for a travel insurance) I was flown to Bangkod, and was treated by a guy called Chanet, who was a proper eye doctor. His diagnosis was that I was suffering from a very bad corneal ulcer, and he recommended me staying at hospital to be treated. I was admitted and spent the next two weeks in a lovely Bangkok hospital, being treated with very agressive antibiotics around the clock. Finally the infection got better and I could fly to Spain.

Doctor Chanet told me I should expect to lose some vision because the ulcer was very central and it would leave a nasty scar, and that if I was very lucky after a few months I could maybe get 30/20 or 40/20 vision in my right eye. I used to have 20/20 in that eye after having my vision corrected by my contact lens. According to doctor Chanet the ulcer was relatively superficial, and the scar wouldn´t be too bad if properly treated.

I have forgotten to say that when I got to Bangkok my visión was so bad that the only thing I could see was the hand of the doctor about 5 inches from my face, and that only if he moved it. By the time I left hospital my vision was still terrible, but I could see shapes and colours. My eye was terribly painful in daylight, and I had to wear very thick sunglasses even in dim light.

Have a look at the pictures to see the evolution of my corneal ulcer during these two weeks. I will continue writing in this blog over the next weeks and months to let you know how it goes.