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Wednesday, 6 January 2016

RETINITIS PIGMENTOSAFIGHT FOR SIGHT


I watched a program on BBC 2 tonight with Hub and Teen. It was interesting. Part of it featured a lady with my eye condition. Again, not personally mine only, but the eye condition I have. Retinitis Pigmentosa.

 

She is almost blind in one eye and totally in the other. She was fitted with the so called bionic eye. Rhian Lewis was given the retinal implant in Oxford eye hospital. It was a ten hour operation in June of 2015. I have always believed that because I could once see, I would easily see again. According to tonight’s program, not the case. Your brain has to be reminded. Within six months she could see a huge cardboard clock tell the time on it something she hasn’t been able to do for over five years. She even could see a silver car but the weird thing she described it in a newspaper article as seeing a strong signal. So it is robotic though the German inventor has got rid of those dreadful ugly glasses that were the first bionic eye. The ten hour operation fits a chip behind the ear and has to attach a chip to the retina they said if it is the tiniest bit out, it wouldn’t work.

 

So Bloggets. Where next?

 

Well, this is a huge advance I think on the Argus II retinal prosthesis that we all got excited about last year. And I feel within the next five years we will just need contact lenses. But we won’t see like sighted people we won’t even see how we did when we were partially sighted. It’s described like an old fashioned black & white telly. With the dots and shadows. So no features? Well, not yet I know this will come though.  I just want to have a button that will reverse our blindness and freeze those with sight still good enough to see the faces of their loved ones.

But this really is the way forward at least we are getting there. And two fingers to the medics who told me just ten years ago that never in my life time will I ever see.  I say two fingers as I was distraught heartbroken. And they knew it. Come on please scientists; let us see like you or close to how you see please?

 

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