becoming partially blind at 23yo 🥲

this isn’t the usual type of content I share, but I thought it was probably the most important thing from my life experience that I can share!

we take so many things for granted in life, and sight is definitely one of the main ones. just SEEING is something that comes so naturally to us, but we don’t treasure it’s importance till our sight is taken away from us.

this is a really long story, but to condense 4 years of trauma into just a few sentences - I got diagnosed with retinal detachment in 2019, and have been partially blind ever since.

the reason why I wanted to share this is because of how scary retinal detachment is, and how I would want people to know that it’s salvageable if you find out and get tested early!!! it’s so so so important to get your eyes regularly tested, especially if retinal detachment runs in your family.

what is retinal detachment? It’s basically when your retina gets pulled away from the back of your eye - resulting in (often) permanent vision loss. I’m no doctor, but that’s how I understand it!

there are multiple causes for this, but mine is likely due to genetics as it runs in my family.

why did my retinal detachment result in permanent blindness? well I’m not 100% sure, but my guess is because I found out too late! I was getting new glasses one day, and during the vision test, I realised that my vision in my left eye was WAVY… not blur, but WAVY! As if smth in my eye was warped. This was so sudden, and I was immediately directed to the A&E, then scheduled for emergency retinal detachment - this was a whole traumatising story on it’s own as I grappled with this during my last year of uni.

Over the next 4 years, I’ve gotten 4 more surgeries and 2 lasers to try and salvage whatever vision I have left. I did basically every type of surgery possible for retinal detachment LOL and not gonna lie I was depressed for a long time after because I didn’t understand why my eyes weren’t getting better - in fact they were getting worse!

Let me know if you want me to share more about the 4 different surgeries, causes, symptoms, recovery etc and I’d love to answer your questions. I’ve also shared a lot about this on tiktok and ig, and have had so many strangers reach out to me because they’ve also been through this invisible illness. It gets so lonely and so scary, especially because literally nobody else can SEE what you’re going through - they can’t see what you see and that’s the most terrifying part. It’s so difficult to wake up one day with just… no vision.

Eye health is so so important and I cannot stress it enough!!!!! Please take good care of your eyes 🫶🏻

#retinaldetachment #eyes #health #Lemon8SG