Macular Degeneration, a failure to communicate
I first heard of macular degeneration maybe twenty years ago when my mother was diagnosed with the condition. She was a little luckier than some in that it did not make her blind and only reduced her vision by a reasonably small amount by the time of her death a couple of years ago from Alzheimer's. My mother-in-law on the other hand became legally blind from it some years ago and lives with the blindness yet today. Even she is still able to see a little and thankfully does not have to live in total darkness. Still today living in a nursing home she can play bingo by holding the card up very close to her face and memorizing the card for that game.
I will not go into the technical aspects of the disease here but rather want to try to make others aware of one of the side effects of the condition. Sadly while the medical community is generally aware of the condition they are totally failing to discuss or prepare the patients for what might happen. If you want to know more about macular degeneration a simple Google search will fulfill your desires. The failure to communicate involves the fairly common propensity of the patient to "see things"... It can manifest itself in any number of ways. People will at times simply see very clear but sometimes completely nonsensical images in front of them. My mother-in-law sees chickens among other things. She has also describes seeing "mouths" moving. Some patients describe seeing mountains especially when climbing stairs. Some end up falling on stairs from the visions since one common vision when climbing stairs is more stairs than are actually there. The failure, and in my mind shame, of the medical community in this situation is that even though I know of a number of folks with this condition that have the "visions", that not one of them has ever been given advance warning of their possibility of occurring. Not a single one... This shameful omission results in most patients developing great fear that their mind is going. Most clam up and never say anything about seeing things and just sit and worry in silence about their sanity. My mother-in-law has a very good mind for 92 and once she knew that the images were just a normal part of the condition has sat and laughed about them for years. When she lived with us I used to tease her that I didn't want her to look for a cure to seeing all of those chickens because we needed the eggs. In her case she has a very lively sense of humor. As I understand it the images are just a projection of sorts from the brain trying to make sense of the garbled signals it is receiving through the optic nerves. I have read that the images are most often of something the patient has seen in their past. In my mother-in-law's case she raised flocks of chickens years ago on the farm in their ongoing efforts to raise their eight children.
If you are ever in a position to discuss this condition with a macular degeneration patient, be sure they know that "seeing things" is normal for that condition. It seems that their medical "professionals" typically cannot be bothered to do so...
Chat later.