That may not be a lot of comfort if you compare yourself to someone who is completely sighted, but if you compare yourself to someone who is completely blind - it's a big deal. That's why visual rehabilitation is so important - you can do a lot with your remaining vision. Among doctors, the biggest misconception about macular degeneration is that diagnosing someone with vision loss from macular degeneration and just sending them home honors the pledge to do no harm. You've got some striking stories about patients who are enraged with their doctors - one story of a retinal specialist who tries to escape out a backdoor after giving a lecture to a room full of senior citizens. Yes, a number of gracious elderly ladies told me they'd like to run their eye doctor over with a car or shoot him with a gun.
Macular degeneration is unusual that way - and it's a new experience for ophthalmologists.
We're used to being able to fix things pretty easily - we don't have widespread blindness in this country because ophthalmology has been so successful. But we've met our match. For many people, losing vision is the hardest thing that's ever happened to them - it's a great life drama that doesn't look like much from the outside. We really need to realize, as a profession, that people aren't all eyeball - and that telling a patient she's got permanent vision loss is telling her that her life has changed. But that's just the beginning - not the end.