For Emily Davidson, life is a roller-coaster of adventure, and she takes the ups and downs, twists and turns in stride. Emily’s love for photography and nature took her from her childhood home in Queens, NY, across America. First, she flew West toward sunny New Mexico, and then to the dynamic San Francisco Bay Area coastline before settling into the Southern charm of Atlanta, GA.
Still, Emily knew that something was getting in the way of experiencing the world fully: her eyesight. Emily had blurry vision and saw halos, starbursts, and smears — symptoms of her keratoconus, a progressive
Patients with HOA often have extreme difficulty with night vision and may see ghosting or have double vision
corneal thinning disorder.
“Between my work helping others and being able to focus on the beauty in gray skies, and the big sunsets and the beautiful scenery, you don’t necessarily realize how bad your vision may be,” she reflects. “It served as a very good distraction for how bad I was seeing.”
Making sacrifices because of vision
Always adaptable to her circumstances, Emily began making sacrifices. First, she stopped going out at night, as the glare from traffic lights made it hard to drive in the dark. As her job in the insurance industry required more computer work, Emily struggled to keep up because the screen was blurry, and her eyes were fatigued after long days. Before, she regularly ventured into the lush landscape surrounding her, but Emily’s poor vision forced her to curb her appetite for hiking; her blurry vision affected her depth perception, and she worried she would fall.
“Because I’ve just managed, and I got by and I played on my strengths, I thought that was okay enough, that I wasn’t really blind,” she recalls. Eventually, Emily realized that her vision had put too many restrictions on her life. “I realized I wasn’t going to certainly be able to do what I wanted, at the level that I wanted, unless I figured it out,” she says.
Learning about scleral lenses
Her ophthalmologist referred her to a doctor who fits scleral lenses in Atlanta. Scleral lenses are large, individually customized contact lenses made from a rigid gas-permeable material. Scleral lenses rest on the white sclera of the eye to vault over the cornea, creating a chamber that is filled with preservative-free saline. Over six months, Emily tried multiple pairs of scleral lenses as the doctor adjusted the prescription and fit. Still, the final pair was far from perfect. Emily still saw starbursts, halos, and double-images, visual imperfections that arise from higher-order aberrations (HOAs) in the visual system. “I was still super uncomfortable, and my HOAs did not get corrected at all,” she says. “I was like, ‘This can’t be it. This can’t be the end.’”
Emily was determined to find a better solution. “Part of what I was willing to do was trust that the technology is getting better and better,” she says.
PROSE treatment and correcting HOAs
Propelled by her confidence that she deserved to see the world clearly and by the recommendation of her ophthalmologist, Emily traveled to BostonSight’s Needham Clinic in the winter of 2023.
Over several days of appointments with Dr. Chirag Patel, OD, FAAO, Emily’s PROSE lenses were customized to fit comfortably and correct her blurry vision and halos with BostonSight’s SmartSight HOA® correction technology. While scleral lenses can help many patients, PROSE by BostonSight is a treatment for more severe ocular surface diseases or challenging conditions. PROSE treatment offers more diameter options and full customization. For many patients like Emily, PROSE along with SmartSight HOA® correction is the only solution to correct visual symptoms like glare, double vision, starbursts, and halos.
“I felt like I was given this next-level vision in 10 days that I couldn’t believe was even possible,” Emily says. “I’m still waking up every day saying is, ‘Is this real?’ because all of my HOAs are gone. I’m able to drive at night and I can look at spreadsheets, something I could not do before.”
Thanks to her clear vision made possible by PROSE and SmartSight HOA, Emily is looking forward to venturing back into the hobbies and passions she was forced to put down. “The quality of my life and the ability to participate in life is like night and day.”