Monday, February 04, 2013

Yearly check-up

You would assume that any "normal" person would probably make pretty damn sure that for their first annual check-up they’d go back and visit the specialist that diagnosed them in the first place….

Well… I’m special…. , or  at least that’s what my parents, brother and aunts and uncles have been telling me my whole life, although I do  think its not meant in a “motivational” manner J


In any case, I did not do what the what a "normal" person would do…. my life had changed dramatically over the last 12months after diagnosis and I was now on the other side of the world and to be fair, the office of the specialist that diagnosed me was at least a 18 hrs travel away from where I currently live… so yeah… bit complicated I guess.

Since it wasn’t going to be practical to travel to London from Malaysia, for just a quick check-up I figured id better get myself organised and find a local specialist…

So, after a bit of online research and some queries aimed at the Keratoconus GB Facebook Support Group Via Twitter using the clever hashtag #kcfamily

 I found out that I was in luck… Petaling Jaya,an area around Kuala Lumpur, where I live has an excellent Eye Hospital stocked with Experts in the Field of Keratoconus, that are acknowledged region wide in the Asia Pacific area The "Tun Hussein Onn National Eye Hospital"


So i figured i would look at getting an apointmnet here as soon as possible.... 
It didn’t start off too well though,  after a failed attempt or 2  in contacting them myself  (language barrier issues ) I was ready  to just take a taxi and walk into reception (highly frustrated probably) and get myself sorted… luckily a local friend stepped in and got me set up with an appointment instead using much less drama. 

On the day of my appointment things got pretty interesting, more to do with cultural differences and language barriers i guess,  still pretty stressful though…
When I got to the hospital I had to first register, all of this goes via signage and a “pull your number to wait in line machine”. 
However, I could for the life of me not find this bloody machine, I found plenty of screens running the numbers off, but not a machine to get a number from…

On top of this I could not read the signage.. a common issue when you have KC I guess, but this was not because of my eyes sight, this was due to not being able to read Malay in the first place of course… J

Luckily there was a lovely lady at one of the desks that saw me looking quite lost and set me off in the right direction.
In the end I had seen 4 different people to register with,  handover my passport to and pay a “foreigner” Bond (all legit bytheway.. no silly business here at all ) before I even had reached the reception desk of the specialist I had to see…

Half of the time I didn’t even had a clue what was going on… but luckily my friend who made the appointment kept me calm by texting me every 5 minutes orso to ask how things were going.
Anyway, i had retrieved all the necessary documents and was finally allowed to go up to the third floor and see the specialist..


Once I had reached the waiting room for my appointment though  my heart sank…. It was packed…. And I mean PACKED…not enough chairs and way too many people…. This was gonna be fun…

In the end it took me an hour and a half from sitting down to be seen… but once I was seen,  things happened really really quickly indeed.

The head of department / main specialist Professor Dato DrVeera Ramani was holding a clinic and saw me first, after having spent a little bit conversing and checking my eyes she referred me to one of her KC experts a Mr Puva who took me through all the regular test like corneal topography, etc..




This took about an hour and a half, and by the time we had finished it was advised to come back a couple of weeks later to run more tests, but this time,  i should not wear my contacts for at least 10days before testing…to give rests to my eyes and be able to set a proper baseline of the status and condition of both eyes…
Made sense…  should be fine, I mean, ive done 8months of it before, so 10days should be pretty easy right? 

Right...........?






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