Author: light2sight5153@gmail.com

Can you really accept being a visually impaired person?  How?  Sue tells us “Every day we accept a little more of our new identity and the ways we now have to live our lives. It is an incremental thing.”  Here’s one tool to help…

Turn Your Mind

I’ve told Sue that I am constantly amazed when after 18 months of research we learn something new.   Sue’s been looking for information about how much she can expect her scotomas (blind spots) to progress.  We’ve learned more about how doctors can follow disease progression including what it means when they see this on a particular test…

Shimmering

Sue has times when she feels sorry for herself.  That’s normal when one’s vision loss impacts daily life.  In this page, she says “We all have our setbacks. We just cannot wallow too long. Sometimes it is time for an…

Attitude Adjustment

Many of us have floaters which are not symptoms of AMD.  How do we know when they are ‘normal’ and when you should have them checked out?  If all else fails, consider them…

Cheap Entertainment

No matter how much we learn, we are always finding new information.  Sue found an article that talks about the fovea, drusen, geographic atrophy, and what happens if wet AMD is not treated.

Always Learning More

There’s more in this article including terms like PED.  Did you know that there are different forms of wet AMD?

Always Learning More and More

A year after her worsening vision caused Sue to take a break from what WAS her normal life, she realizes that now she’s writing about…

My Uneventful Life

We’ve discovered that getting answers to questions about what happens when AMD progresses isn’t always easy.  Sue has found that she’s not the only one who thinks that figuring all this out is like…

Playing Clue

When Sue wrote this, it was a little over a year after her vision changed such that she had to take a break from doing some of the things she loved to do.  It was hard to give up some of her freedoms but she was able to get most of them back. She talks about one of them on a…

Beautiful Day for a Bike Ride

Sue loves quotes, here’s one of her favorites from Victor Frankl: “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity – under even the most difficult circumstances to add a deeper meaning to his life.”

Meaning and Purpose

One of our readers who is a member of our Facebook group shared her preparation for and experience of driving after not driving for 3 years because of the visual problems from her AMD.   She agreed to let us include what she told us in a series of pages.

The 3 pages are linked together so you can start here and continue to pages 2 and 3:

Behind the Wheel: Part 1

Here are the links to pages 2 & 3:

Behind the Wheel: Part 2

Behind the Wheel: Part 3

If you have any comments, please share them here or come to our Facebook group for our discussion.

Do you know what the rods and cones are in our eyes?  What do they do that is so important? What does that have to do with stem cell research?  Find out and learn why the eye would be an…

Electrician’s Nightmare

We know Sue is hard on parts. What did she do THIS time?  It’s a…

Cautionary Tale

Do you have high blood pressure?  Do you take medications for it?  High blood pressure has been linked to AMD especially to the wet form.  Unfortunately, some types of medications – beta blockers – for blood pressure can increase one’s risk for wet AMD.  Read about what that means in terms of…

Preventative Maintenance

Have you heard the phrase “if it sounds too good to be true it probably is”?  Unfortunately, there are individuals and companies who want to take your money.  How do you spot a fraud?  Sue gives us some guidelines.

Quack, Quack

When people offer to help you, do you feel that they pity you or sympathize with you?  Is there a difference?  Sue tells why we should…

Let People Help You

The website for the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) says that it “is the largest and most respected eye and vision research organization in the world. Our members include nearly 12,000 researchers from over 75 countries”.  Sue shares information from presentations related to retinal issues at past conferences.

Serious Work

Too Much of a Good Thing

We are always looking for people to write for us.  If you are interested, let us know at light2sight5153@gmail.com.  I’ll be happy to help with the editing and I’ll put your words on the website.

Do you have a blind spot (called a scotoma)? Does it make reading difficult?  There are techniques called eccentric viewing and steady eye strategy that can help you to use your peripheral vision and the to look past…

Your Fuzzy Spot

Sue ran out of work which rarely happens. Is there an art to doing nothing? In other words, can you “engage in nonproductive or inconsequential activity” which she calls…

Putzing Around

There are some of you who ARE caregivers, some of you who HAVE caregivers.  For Sue, her current caregivers are those who get her where she wants to go and those who help her with something she can’t do or read.  What does the burden of caregiving do to our relationships with our spouses, partners, family members? What can we do to help them?

Fair and Impartial

One of the fears of AMD is that of going totally blind.  Sue searched for specific information about how much of her visual field would be affected by her advanced AMD (geographic atrophy) and found what she thinks are some answers.  And again, she says…

Love Wikipedia

As you know, many of the pages that we are posting now have been written months ago.  Some are more current when they are responding to topics that come up in the Facebook group.  Sue and I have decided that we will start posting 2 pages at a time in an attempt to get caught up with ‘real time’.

We’ve talked about the grieving process that is part of dealing with a diagnosis of AMD and other vision-changing eye diseases.  There are stages to grieving, one of which is acceptance.  In terms of DBT, there is radical acceptance which teaches “it is what it is” and has us asking…

Why NOT Me?

Sue practices what she preaches.  She writes about contributing to the lives of others as one way to deal with distress a la DBT.   When she wrote this page, she needed something that didn’t take much time or effort (or crafting skill ::smile::). She found quite a few great ideas for…

C for Contribute

There are some words you don’t want to use when talking to Sue: “can’t” and “should not”.  The only thing that she truly “can’t” do now is drive.  She believes that with everything else, there is…

A Compromise for Today

• Category: Sue’s Musings
• Keywords: bike, biking, independent, interdependent

Do you have any suggestions for other categories or keywords?  Let me know in a comment here or send me an email at light2sight5153@gmail.com.

Sue continues to test apps, one of them is NaturalReader which she wrote about in the previous page (Jabbering) – that’s what the “whoopsie” is about.  She talks about e-books and sources of them as well as about biking and investing – another mixed bag!

Whoopsie!

• Categories: Financial, Future, Low Vision Aid, Research, Sue’s Musings, Technology: Phone/Tablet/Computer
• Keywords: BARD, biking, DRM, eBooks, Gutenberg Project, iBooks, investing, NaturalReader, Nook, overdrive, research

Do you have any suggestions for other categories or keywords?  Let me know in a comment here or send me an email at light2sight5153@gmail.com.

Sue talks about several different topics and tells us that “Low vision does not have to mean no fun!” Catch up on her latest antics.  Plus, she finally was able to try the cardboard goggles I sent her with her new smartphone with the app Nearsighted VR.  It did not work well for her, unfortunately.  She shares why it didn’t plus gives us the scoop on a great free service & a great new app.

Jabbering

• Categories: Low Vision Aid, Sue’s Musings, Symptoms, Technology: Android, Technology: Phone/Tablet/Computer
• Keywords: BookBub, cardboard goggles, e-books, Natural Reader, NaturalReader, Near Sighted app

Do you have any suggestions for other categories or keywords?  Let me know in a comment here or send me an email at light2sight5153@gmail.com.

We’ve already talked about preconceived notions.  Here’s another one.  Have you been wearing eyeglasses & had someone question you about them, wondered why the lenses weren’t bottom-of-soda-bottle thick?  Depending on how your vision has been affected by AMD, getting your refractive errors fixed can help.  But the bottom line is that we are not all like…

Mr. Magoo!

• Categories: Low Vision Aid, Non-AMD Eye Problems, Sue’s Musings
• Keywords: astigmatism, hyperopia, myopia, prisms, refractive errors

Do you have any suggestions for other categories or keywords?  Let me know in a comment here or send me an email at light2sight5153@gmail.com.

If you’ve been reading Sue’s pages (and you should be ::smile::), you know that Sue is very physically active including hiking & biking in her area. She’s not the only one with visual impairments to do so and she shares stories of several others who…

Hike and Bike

• Categories: Personal Stories, Sue’s Musings, Tips for living with low vision
• Keywords: Appalachian Trail, bike, biking, Bill Irwin, Blind Courage, Canada, hike, rail, rails to trails, The Great Trail, trail, Trevor Thomas

Do you have any suggestions for other categories or keywords?  Let me know in a comment here or send me an email at light2sight5153@gmail.com.

Many of you are working and hope to continue doing so for as long as possible.  Sue writes about some things that can happen when vision loss changes the dynamics of…

Chiefs & Indians

• Categories: Sue’s Musings
• Keywords: career, contribute, job, work

Do you have any suggestions for other categories or keywords?  Let me know in a comment here or send me an email at light2sight5153@gmail.com.

It occurred to me that some of you don’t remember when we did NOT have microwaves! They were invented in the 1940s but not affordable till the 1970s.  Before that, there were ‘TV dinners’, the first of which – the Swanson TV dinner – was advertised in 1955: “In 25 minutes, your wife could make a meal with ‘hearty slices of moist tender Swanson turkey, with whipped sweet potatoes and golden Swanson butter.’ The original TV dinner also included ‘garden fresh’ peas and a cornbread dressing.”   We have come a long way!  If you have problems putting together a ‘real’ meal, modern microwave dinners are an option as are meals from programs like Meals on Wheels in the US.  Good thing because Sue is…

Domestic Goddess – Not!

• Categories: Nutrition, Sue’s Musings, Tips for living with low vision
• Keywords: cooking, Meals at Home, Meals on Wheels, frozen dinners, frozen meals

Do you have any suggestions for other categories or keywords?  Let me know in a comment here or send me an email at light2sight5153@gmail.com.

I proposed this topic to Sue because of an article I shared with the Facebook group Re-thinking Antioxidant Supplementation for Macular Degeneration which presents criticism of the AREDS research.  Considering that many doctors recommend the supplements from that research as if they were a ‘treatment’, how do we as patients deal with the conflicting information that we find? As several of the Facebook group members pointed out, it’s not only in this field that we are faced with this (is fat OK or not OK, is coffee OK or not OK, etc).  How do we deal with it?  The question becomes: is there any way of…

Overcoming Uncertainty

• Category: Cognitive Therapy, Future, Research, Sue’s Musings, Treatment
• Keywords: DBT, limbic system, research, treatment, uncertainty

Do you have any suggestions for other categories or keywords?  Let me know in a comment here or send me an email at light2sight5153@gmail.com.

We continue to talk about scotomas/blind spots in terms of Sue’s geographic atrophy.  Do you know where the term came from, what the word ‘geographic’ means? In seas of healthy tissue, there are…

Islands of Damage

• Category: Dry AMD, Sue’s Musings, Symptoms, The Science Stuff
• Keyword: Amsler Grid, choroid, depigmentation, eccentric viewing, fovea, geographic atrophy, lesions, pigment, scotoma, scotomata

Do you have any suggestions for other categories or keywords?  Let me know in a comment here or send me an email at light2sight5153@gmail.com.

My earlier post had an incorrect link to The Blind Spot – Part 1.  It is corrected below.  I guess I should had a 3rd cup of coffee this morning ::grin::

In our Facebook group, we’ve been discussing the presence of blind spots call scotomas that can occur with AMD.  They are most common with advanced dry AMD called geographic atrophy but can occur with wet AMD as well.

The Blind Spot – Part 1

and

The Blind Spot – Part 2

• Categories: Sue’s Musings, Symptoms, The Science Stuff
• Keywords: absolute scotoma, bilateral scotoma, blind spot, central scotoma, eccentric viewing, hemianopic scotoma, optic chiasm, paracentral scotoma, peripheral scotoma, photoreceptors, scotoma, scotomata

Do you have any suggestions for other categories or keywords?  Let me know in a comment here or send me an email at light2sight5153@gmail.com.

In our Facebook group, we’ve been discussing the presence of blind spots call scotomas that can occur with AMD.  They are most common with advanced dry AMD called geographic atrophy but can occur with wet AMD as well.

The Blind Spot – Part 1

and

The Blind Spot – Part 2

• Categories: Sue’s Musings, Symptoms, The Science Stuff
• Keywords: absolute scotoma, bilateral scotoma, blind spot, central scotoma, eccentric viewing, hemianopic scotoma, optic chiasm, paracentral scotoma, peripheral scotoma, photoreceptors, scotoma, scotomata

Do you have any suggestions for other categories or keywords?  Let me know in a comment here or send me an email at light2sight5153@gmail.com.