Sightsavers : What my sight means to me.
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I was 9 years old.
I was sat on the floor with the rest of my class having an eye test at school.
It was my turn.
The optician or nurse or whoever it was (I was 9, I wasn't really paying attention) asked me to read the bottom line.
I couldn't.
She asked me to read the next line up.
I couldn't.
She asked me to start from the top and work my way down (cue sniggers from the rest of my class).
My parents were called and told to make an immediate appointment at the opticians where I was told that I shouldn't be left to cross the road alone as my eyesight was so bad.
20 something (ahem) years ago, the glasses choices were as bad as my eyesight.
I spent many years resembling a younger version of Deirdre Barlow. Here is a snapshot of my teenage years. (My other half can't quite believe I am sharing this publicly).
Thankfully when I was old enough to pay for my own glasses, my choices were much more on trend!
That didn't mean I wasn't subject to years of taunts of "four eyes" "penfold" and "speccy". It certainly meant I saw certain people differently.
So when my 9 year old asked for glasses, my heart sank a little bit. Was she struggling? Was she getting headaches? She insisted that she needed them so I took her to the opticians for a check up.
As it happens, her eyesight was perfectly fine. She just thought it was cool to wear glasses. How times have changed?
I have lived with my glasses for 25 years and whilst I may joke that I am "blind as a bat", I am lucky enough to be able to go to the optician and get glasses that suit me (well in recent years anyway). My glasses mean that I can see the expressions on my girls faces, I can see to type this blog post and I can see to cross the road. That is not the case for lots of people across the world.
80 per cent of all blindness could be prevented or cured. That’s over 31 million people, most of whom live in the poorest countries in the world who go blind unnecessarily. And with poverty being both a cause and effect of blindness, a cycle is created that can be hard for communities to break out of.
SightSavers can break this cycle with straightforward operations costing £8-£28 or annual doses of antibiotics costing 7p-35p per person.
If you’re moved to give someone their sight please visit www.sightsavers.org.uk/donate.
Thank you for reading (and hopefully not laughing too much at my photo!!)
