What if I go blind?

This post is in regards to the Daily Prompt: Acceptance, while knowing I will fight.

Venus taken by Duane Cobb trying out new camera—representing  a sliver of my fearful imagination, a bright speck in the nighttime. 

Hello readers,

It’s been a while since I wrote anything anywhere because my eyeballs hurt.

After finishing up a book for a client I finally went to see the eye doctor and not only has my prescription (for glasses) changed, my optic nerve disintegrated over these last twelve months in the same way that someone’s would if they had experienced a recent hard blow to the back of the head, which I most certainly did not. (Although my eye-pressure is pretty normal.)

New glasses came in and, although I continue to get used to them, my eyes still hurt. I don’t know where this will lead but down a road of plenty of B vitamins and more money spent on specialized eye exams.

What will special testing tell me besides I’m going blind at a pretty darn fast rate? That I have M.S. or glaucoma or some other dastardly thing I don’t want? That I won’t be able to put on my make-up or do other womanly primping types of things? What if I smeared blush all over my face thinking it was moisturizer? These are scary things to contemplate.

For me, worst cast scenario is blindness, since my Dad was diagnosed with M.S. and he handles that quite well —leaving me a lot to live up to if that’s my diagnosis—and so I Googled “blind bloggers” to see what others are doing, should my path be similar to theirs and discovered some very interesting and inspirational people.

And, because I’m never the only one who experiences things that happen while living life,  I want to share a few special people I discovered with you.

• The Blind Blogger, Maxwell Ivy. I read more than a few pages of his blog and am intrigued.  He wrote a motivational eBook titled Leading You Out of the Darkness Into the Light: A Blind Man’s Inspirational Guide to Success . That book sounds like something I would want to have in my arsenal should I go blind. But how to read it when glasses don’t do the trick anymore?
• Well, I’ll be darned if the American Foundation for the Blind didn’t have a post  titled How to Make Your Blog Accessible to Blind Readers. And, after reading that, I can see that even in this post I’ve gone and made a few mistakes. For instance, I always have my links designed to open within a new tab and I found that doing so  makes navigation harder for those with sight impairments. They would, according to the AFB, rather just hit the back button.
• Here is a woman named Nichole who went blind in 2001, and has a blog called Blind Mom Blog. She’s even got a recipe page.

 

Well, I don’t want to go blind. I’m an artist, after all.

So I Googled “blind artists”

Here are some pretty fabulous paintings and artists:

• From the site Illusion Scene, a list of 10 remarkable paintings by visually impaired artists.
• On the site toptenz.net, I found a post titled 10 amazing blind painters and out of these I zeroed in on  Esref Armagan and watched the video. WOW. I had to stop with his video and confess his is the only one I watched. I must absorb what I’ve learned from that. What I learned is something I’ve always hoped was so and it is such a good thing it deserves the single-mindedness I want to give it just now. Will you do the same? We can watch the others some other time.

My conclusion? Whatever the outcome of the more specialized eye tests, maybe things aren’t so dark after all.

I’d love to hear from other writers and artists who keep on keeping on and from my readers, especially those of you who watch Esref’s video.