Tuesday 5 February 2013

Glaucoma Poem


...being tested this Friday for Glaucoma after burning my eye with bleach last weekend. No fun for a visual poet...

4 comments:

Jim Murdoch said...

My father had glaucoma and, as you may or may not know, it’s something you can pass onto your kids but it doesn’t usually show up until later life so I’m acutely aware of my vision. He was quite far gone, however, before he went and got tested. He assumed—and probably not unreasonably—that his deteriorating eyesight was just old age but it wasn’t. To his credit he managed to stop it getting worse than it was by taking care of his eyes—he used to splash them with cold water for one thing—but he probably only bought himself another couple of years and by the time he was in his late sixties he was registered as blind which he hated; his white stick embarrassed him and he only used it when he felt he absolutely had to. Let me go deaf by all means but I can’t imagine—or, to be more precise, I don’t want to imagine—a life even struggling to see let alone being blind. I didn’t realise you could do something to give yourself glaucoma though. That sucks and I hope the testing goes well.

Stephen Nelson said...

I think the bleach incident just helped them catch early signs of Glaucoma. My grandfather had it so it's in the family. It may just be that the accident increased the pressure in my eye however. I'll find out tomorrow.

Stephen Nelson said...

Blindness would be awful. I'd much rather be deaf too, although I feel funny saying that. Deafness might actually be an advantage given all the noise pollution in our towns and cities.

Stephen Nelson said...
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