Vroom with a view

Journalist and motorcycle enthusiast Gareth Ashman was in pole position for a promising career as a bike racer when a little-known eye condition brought his hopes to a screeching halt. The future looked dim for Gareth until a chance meeting with an optometrist at Moorfields Eye Hospital gave him back his eyesight and steered his biking aspirations back into the fast lane.

Gareth Ashman lives in Peterborough and has a condition called Keratoconus that affects both of his eyes. Gareth, 35, is a keen motorcyclist and was alarmed to discover one day that he was seeing double white lines in the road, where there was only one.

Keratoconus was relatively unheard of in the 1980s and when Gareth’s optometrist examined him he wrongly diagnosed his condition as congenital cataracts, reassured him that it wasn’t progressive and that it was unlikely to get worse.

Ghosting effect

Keratoconus is an illness that affects young adult males more than females and there is a gradual deterioration in vision as the shape of the cornea changes: “I was a student at the time and this of course made reading very difficult. My optician had no idea what I’d got and his advice was ‘get a brighter reading light and put it nearer when you read’. Driving and bike riding were getting harder too,” recalls Gareth.

By 1992, Gareth could tolerate this no longer and asked to be referred to Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, knowing that this was the best eye hospital in the world. Indeed, he had been in the hospital for less than 20 minutes when one of the hospital workers ventured that he might have the condition known as Keratoconus. Initially, Moorfields advised Gareth that he needed two corneal transplants. However, a chance consultation with an optometrist there who was working on groundbreaking scleral contact lenses as a non-invasive (ie. non surgical) solution for Keratoconus sufferers proved a breakthrough.

: “… with these lenses, I suddenly found my vision was greatly improved, I could read again, I could ride my motorbike on the roads, so all in all these scleral lenses gave me my life back. It puts a whole new perspective on your life!”

Keen athlete

Gareth revealed that he was a keen athlete and did a lot of sailing, skiing and off-road motorcycle racing, so the optometrist found him a pair of scleral lenses to try as an experiment. He found them very easy to insert, wear, clean and within ten minutes Gareth could tell that these were for him. “I found scleral lenses an absolute revelation. The Moorfields optometrist recommended them because of the steepness of the cone in my eyes, because of what I do for a living, and what my interests were. I walked outside and I found I could at last see properly.

“By this time, my vision had deteriorated to a point where I could no longer see well enough to ride, write or work. But suddenly, I found it was improved to the point where I could read and I could ride my motorbike on the roads, so all in all these scleral lenses gave me my life back. It puts a whole new perspective into your life!”

Enduro off-road bikes

In the meantime, Gareth had been wearing hard, corneal contact lenses, which he found uncomfortable and occasionally even dangerous to wear: “Not only were they painful, easy to lose or break, but they had a tendency to fall out in the worst possible circumstances. I have raced track bikes at most of the race circuits in the UK and I remember a track day at Silverstone circuit in the mid-90s when one blew out when I was riding down the back straight at over 130mph on a Honda Fireblade! I remember blinking and the corneal lens just blew out of my eye. It was so painful and of course you then have to close your eye – and with it your other eye too. Not ideal when you’re doing 130mph!” recalls Gareth.

“I also race Enduro off-road bikes through forests and one of the races I particularly remember is a two-day British Championship event called the Natterjack at Weavers Down in Hampshire. I did that in the days when I wore hard corneal lenses and the sand and the dust made wearing them absolute agony. My eyes were red raw by the end of that race. Then a couple of years later I did the same race again, when I was wearing scleral lenses, and I had absolutely no problems at all.

“With scleral lenses I can now ride my bike at over 100mph, in the rain, without a visor, on a track and it doesn’t hurt my eyes. One trick I’ve learned (when I’m doing endurance bike racing at night) is to put some fluorescein in the contact lenses, which gives me much better night vision. An amusing side-effect is when I walk into a night club or disco it makes my eyes glow like Michael Jackson in Thriller !”

‘Guinea pig’

“Scleral lenses can give bikers an advantage over even people with normal eyesight. My supplier has also prescribed all-enveloping scleral-type lenses to water skiers and skydivers who have relatively normal eyesight or don’t need correction at all but appreciate the physical protection it gives their eyes in these extreme conditions. I also find they give me protection from the effects of chlorine in the water.