FIGHT FOR SIGHT PLEASE?

Good morning my friends and Blogget family. Oh my word, I am shattered already. My morning started with first logging onto my lap top, to see if there was any  news from my family in the US, about my stolen Dads health, as if you remember yesterday, he had to go and see a cancer specialist? Well he has been given some very expensive cream, which as far as I can gather, makes it easier, to detect where the cancer is? The specialist, doesn’t think it is as serious as it was last year. Cancer no longer always means death thank God?

Cancer UK is the richest charity in Britain, and that is fantastic, I wish all important life changing charities, were equally as rich?

Thank God that Cancer UK, has continuous funds, with the help of very kind people, we need so badly everyone’s help, charities like  The RNIB, for the blind, have only 20/24 weeks of reserve money, as their policy, is whatever money they have after then, they spend. This is fantastic, means it is not a greedy charity, or a money making charity, I know that charity and money making, are not supposed to be linked, but, sadly, this is sometimes the case.

The only thing that the RNIB do that I really do not think is a good thing, is, they spend a lot of resources, on preventing sight loss.

I think that should be a separate charity. RNIB, should be for the blind, or people who are almost blind. Sight loss, can be for people who at the moment, have full sight, this means, there is less money, goes on blind people? This is what the charity was initially meant for.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it is so very important for there to  be companies / organisations, which educate people against sight loss, as the RNIB rightly say, Sight is incredibly precious and we live in an increasingly visual world.   Avoidable sight loss in Britain, is unacceptably high. Fifty per cent of sight loss is avoidable.

Public health messages on the consequences of smoking, obesity, diabetes or high blood pressure rarely highlight that an outcome could be the loss of your sight.

Many individuals fail to understand that their lifestyle has a direct impact on their sight and they fail to take measures to protect and maintain their vision.

So should this not be up to the government to inform people, Optitions, Doctors, schools, Universities and other forms of education and media?

I just feel like blind people are getting forgotten about. Is there enough research going on?

You see, going blind, is not considered a so called death sentence. Should it be?

Yes, I am sure it should? How many people just simply cannot live with the fact that they have gone blind? They no longer, can see their children’s faces/smiles, see them acting in their school plays, help them to learn to read and write, look over their shoulders to see how they are getting on whilst doing a painting, or a jigsaw puzzle?

 The thought of the blind person not being able to see their daughters walking down the aisle to meet with their new Husband to be? Their Grandchildren, to not be able to be in the sighted world is a real sentence to some people. Not to be able to see colours any more, the orange sky at night, fireworks, the ocean, flowers, what is on their plate, when to stop pouring hot tea into a cup, learn to iron  without seriously burning themselves. Cooking a fried egg? Try doing that with your eyes closed? Make sure there is someone in the house with you though, but not in the same room, as they will help you and not all newly blind people, will have someone in the house with them?

I had a nightmare measuring my babies bottle, with the milk formula.

Telling the time, when you are not from the blind world and you are newly blind, you don’t know what is available. I really struggled with all of that as I did not want to except that I had gone blind.

Forget walking free without an aid of some sort.

Learning how people can be so cruel, without  knowing? People ignore the blind  person, as the concept of them being able to have a “normal conversation? Is an impossibility as the blind person is  “So ignorant” why? Because the sighted person has smiled at them across the street, or across the room, or in the playground of the child’s  school and the blind person has not responded. Why have they not responded? Because they cannot see the person smiling at them, I know spot the obvious, but, the so called obvious, is never obvious to a lot of sighted people, take for  example, yesterday when I went to the shop. I have now a catalogue of quotations the man in the shop has said to me.

Firstly, after kindly helping me around the shop with my shopping, he asked me some weeks ago,

 to place my card in the machine, then press the green button? Then asked if he could

help me to my car?

And yesterday, he was asking about my dog and the others at home, I told him getting my guide dog to put her collar on to come to the shop, was a nightmare as all three dogs were stood there, and I had to decide which dog was which? OK, this one is a good one, he then turned to me and said,

“Hmm, that must be really hard, as specially when

(they are all black)

Now if you have read this and thought,

“I don’t get any of that? Then you are those people who just don’t think, if you have read it and thought, oh, how stupid are people? Well I can tell you, a lot of very intelligent people have said things like that to me. I just laugh it off now, as I know the people who have said silly things, feel bad afterwards, but when you are newly blind, it is not a laughing matter.

I some years ago, ordered some deer /expensive windows for my old house. The builder told me he would sort it all out. I stressed which company I wanted to deliver them, he insisted, I was  going to get only the best.

My X Husband, came home early that day from work. To find a van delivering windows with the logo on the van, from a very very inexpensive company. The builders who were doing my extension at the time, didn’t even say sorry and continued putting in the windows. I had a awful time with them.

Painters have said they have done my room and wen a sighted person has come to my house, some months later, they have told me that the paint work is really unacceptable and inadequate.

Too late to do anything.

These things really can bring you down in life, for sure make the trust you have with the outside world very slim, if any at all?

When I went blind, it was spring time, I really couldn’t bare waking up to the  dark, going in the bath, in a empty whole filled withwater. Having lunch in the dark all of my clothes were of no colour. The daffodils were just a name, nothing to look at in the garden anymore. My babies face used to smile at me and I didn’t know. Were the lights on or off, was it sunny or cloudy outside?

Who’s toothbrush was I using? Was it shampoo or shower gel or something worse?

The worst thing was the time, the days went on forever. I didn’t know the time.

No longer being able to see the clock. Letters would come through the door, birthday cards,  Christmas cards, what were they, bits of paper to me!

I know of many people who never leave the house. They can’t. It’s too hard, too painful and so boring?

There are people who sit in their homes and cry all day. We don’t see these people, we see the super blind, who can do anything they put their mind to and the depressed blind, are just forgotten about.

There was a Police man who was blinded by a bullet to the face in the Northeast of England. Hub and I met with him, he  went from a strong man, to a week sad individual, to hanging himself, after losing his wife as well as his career.

Please  please, help me to fight for sight?