My eyesight has been stolen by fucking macular degeneration. No intensifier would be better than this one for this rotten lousy disease. It got my left eye many years ago, but my stalwart right eye prevailed until a month ago, and I depended on it. One blighted Saturday morning, I awakened to disaster. My right eye saw only distortions.
I cannot read anything at present. My beloved familiar city is totally alien, a place of shadows and dangers, elevators with buttons I cannot read, streetlights that seem opaque. I’m lost in it.
I have known that this was probable, but what has happened seems inconceivable. It’s one thing to joke about being in danger, it’s quite another to have been destroyed. I keep thinking that it will go away, but it won’t, obviously. I am trying to cope, but I think it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
From my point of view, the blind are the bravest folks around. To stare at print, even large print, and see only blur, is impossible.
Maybe it will get better. The urge to write is perhaps even stronger, now that I can’t read. I have even more to say. This note appears courtesy of my daughter, and no doubt she will help me again. If any reader knows a magical cure for macular degeneration, I would be grateful. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, I want to continue to sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world. Currently it is just a faint yip, but barbaric nonetheless.