Blindness

A few weeks ago a wrote a post on my worst fear, but I wasn’t being completely honest. I am afraid of getting old and rather paranoid about Slenderman, but the thing I fear most in the world is also, to a degree, inevitable. I’m afraid of going blind.

As we age, our eyes refuse to adjust and focus as they did when we were younger. We may start needing glasses to read when we didn’t before. I started wearing glasses at the ripe old age of 2, and continue to this day. My eyesight has finally begun to “plateau,” or not decrease as rapidly as it did a few years ago, but it’s still getting worse. The frames don’t bother me, but my eyes are at about a -9, which is really bad. The bottom half of my lenses are bifocals not because I’m farsighted, but because my 16 year-old eyes can’t adjust to the strength of my nearsighted prescription.

I’ve never really minded wearing glasses. I enjoy the style aspect of them (mine have zebra stripes along the sides) and the “looking smart” vibe they give off. But if my eyes continue to get worse before the usual signs of aging eyes, I’m not sure there’s a lot that can be done when they do begin. Currently I’m looking into the Lasik eye surgery to correct at least part of my nearsightedness and astigmatism (when the eye curvature is too rounded or too flat), but I’ve been warned there’s not a lot of hope for a complete fix and I need to wait until I’m well into my twenties before I could even consider the surgery. Assuming I’m going to college and possibly medical school, I couldn’t afford the surgery to begin with, but factoring in the possibility of losing depth perception or sight altogether, I’m not sure that it’s a risk I want to take. I’m not trying to be melodramatic, but it’s an issue I’ve been thinking a lot about.

If I do lose the greater portion of my sight, it would destroy most if not all of what I’m planning to do with my life. I could never be a doctor. I’m not even sure what I could do. This probably sounds terrible ungrateful considering I can see fairly well with glasses as is, but I’m afraid of it nevertheless.

Thanks for listening, guys. Just needed to get that out there.