ArticleBlog | Don’t you see? Visual impairment and the church
Don’t you see? Visual impairment and the church
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 18.03.17
Mary, from North Yorkshire, is a regular attender at worship in her local church. She worked for many years as a nursery nurse and enjoyed many kinds of handiwork in her spare time: tapestry, cross stitch, making her own clothes, painting and calligraphy. She led a banner-making group, ran a toddler group and led and spoke at church meetings.
In 1985 she became aware that the sight in her left eye was very gradually deteriorating, and in 1998 was diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) – a condition in which the central vision becomes progressively blurred, meaning that reading becomes more difficult, colours are less vibrant and it is harder to recognise faces. Peripheral vision is usually unaffected, so sufferers might see the outline of something but not the fine detail.
Mary says, ‘I coped with this quite well, apart from bright sun; colours changed, especially blue and green. Gardening was awkward, but on the whole things were not too bad.’ However, Mary suffered a haemorrhage to the other eye resulting in her being registered blind in 2000, at the age of 82. This time she tells me she was ‘Devastated! I sat with my hands in my lap. I could still cook and bake and had talking baking scales, and various magnifiers. My husband read to me and we did crosswords together. Since my husband died in 2008 I do find life difficult.’
