I was born with cateracts, which wasn't discovered until I was a year old. Since your sense of vision isn't fully developed at birth, it's very important that any problems be addressed as soon as possible to allow vision to develop normally. By the time they discovered my cateracts, it was too late.

They could still remove the cateracts and I'd be able to see but my vision would never be able to develop fully, so to get 20/60 vision I had to wear very thick bifocals. If you don't know, 20/60 vision means that I could only see about one third of the detail people with normal 20/20 vision see. So while I could still do most things like ride a bike or read mainstream books and newspapers, my vision wasn't good enough to allow me to drive.

Then when I was about 16 the vision in my left eye started looking like I was looking through water. My eye doctor said he couldn't see anything wrong so my dad stopped looking into it further and eventually the left eye went completely dark. Later when I was visiting my mom , she took me to an eye doctor near where she lived and he refered us to a retina specialist where I found out my left eye had suffered a complete retina detachment and that it was too old to attempt reattaching it. My dad was so mad at my eye doctor that when we visited him after I returned from my mom's place with news about what happened to the left eye, he told me to wait in the waiting room and went in to see the doctor by himself. When he came out he had a look on his face that scared me. We never went back to that doctor for my yearly eye exams.

I suspect that if suing your doctor had been a thing back then, he would have probably sued him right out of business.

For the next 20 or so years, my vision was stable and changed very little, then I was diagnosed with severe glaucoma. At that time eyedrops were all that was needed to keep it under control.

Ten or so more years later and the eye drops were no longer keeping my glaucoma under control, and I started noticing the effect it was having on my vision. Not the narrowing of the field of view they are always describing how glaucoma effects your vision but a slowly growing fog over my entire field of view and sensitivity to bright light.

Since I'd had eye surgery before for my cateracts I wasn't a candidate for a laser procedure that was available for glaucoma so I opted to have a shunt put in. At first it was working and keeping my eye pressures down but then the shunt  started working through the layers of the sclera, the white of the eye,  and backing out of the eye and leaving the eye open to infection so they had to remove it so they could reclose the eye.

Through all of this my vision never stopped deteriorating. I am now at the point where the only thing I can just barely make out are sources of light, or things with a high contrast to their backgrounds but only as an area that's slightly lighter or darker. I haven't been able to see enough detail to get by with a magnifier since late 2013. That's when I bought JAWS 15.

I will eventually go completely blind, probably within the next two years.

When I was diagnosed with glaucoma, the doctor told me that it was common for people who have cateracts at birth to develop glaucoma later in life. He also said that at present with wasn't known whether the glaucoma is a result of having the surgery or whether it would develop regardless.

You are fortunate that you can still see color. The only color I see any more is the color of the fog over what little vision I have left generated by my brain.

At least I can be thankful I had vision for most of my life so I have my memories. Other than the words, those who have never had vision have no concept of what color is. On the other hand, you can't miss what you've never had either.

@fatih

Yeah, Things got pretty dark for me during those years when I went from very usable 20/60 vision down to legally blind where they tested my vision with hand motions.

I remember thinking that if I had to be blind, that maybe it would have been better if I had stayed blind from birth, instead of loosing my vision later in life after I had gotten used to being able to see.

But now, I'm thankful for all those sighted years. I have lots of good memories from them, while I have few, if any, really good memories from after I started losing my vision.

But then, since I was declared legally blind only three to four years ago, I consider myself a rank beginner, still wet behind the ears, at being blind.

I never said that they don't care about color. They do, just like sighted people do. For example, unless they want to look like a crazy person or a clown, they need to be aware of what color the clothes they are putting on are so that they can be sure that they go well together.

What I said was that if you've never seen color, you can't miss it. Though I'll admit you might regret not having seen it.

How ironic. Glaucoma causes more preventable blindness than any other disease, yet there are some forms of glaucoma where blindness can't be prevented.

At least I am thankful for the sighted years I had, some people don't even get that much. And I am thankful that I didn't start losing my vision until age 53.

@12: Indeed, Ive been told by consultants my vision was stable and wouldn't get any worse, then it just dropped off a cliff, each of my consultants I saw just told me oh eat X Y and Z to manage the pressure. Fortunately I actually like most of the foods they suggested, but just managing the pressure, Really. Is that the best they can do? (Admittedly, I did go in for cycolodiode laser thingy surgery....I don't remember the details but I remember looking out my bedroom window and not leaving my bed for a day and hiding in a dark room)

Credit where it's due, my local NHS trust haven't put a foot wrong....well, actually, lemme clarify that.

The doctors, from the very first consultant who put me into cryotherapy and has often told me I have a claim to fame as either the first or one of the first people in the country to be put into cryotherapy to save my other eye (though I dunno how true that is, I just toss it into conversation), and the past few consultants I've had have known their stuff....though the actual management of the hospital, holy crap it's been shoving from pillar to post, sending out appointments then in the same letter telling me oh I have to wait 3 months for one, so I book a vacation and halfway on the road I get a call oh hey, come in tomrrow for a test.

Again. I can't fault the doctors, nurses, pharmacy techs, researchers into glaucoma....my issue lies with the middle managers and the way my local hospital is run, That, and the fact they cannot, for love nor money, attract a glaucoma specialist. I had my laser diode whatever it's called surgery done by a specialist who went to anotheer NHS trust and does the name Dr Mr Annand ring any bells, as I've run across his name on papers.

He was extremely friendly and professional and reassuring, so credit where it's due to him, but when he ame in specifically to do a weekend surgery the nurses there treated him....from what I hard, like crap, least, the youger ones. I got up to go to the toilet and I got shouted back to my bed by a nurse in training, it took a doctor who heard me explaining to basically tell the trainee nurse that yes, patients are actually allowed to go to the toilet if they are supervised. Which meant, humorously, II had a doctor outside the bathroom door. I had my brother come in from the States at tha t time to keep watch on me and he asked me, quote; Why do you need to take a piss test, you been on the roids again?

(Fun fact: I did, actually, legitimately get given steroid injections. Which made it all the funnier...nurses had no idea what we were laughing about, though admittedly....)

Okay, Gripe 2 with my nurses, or rather the hospital. My grandmother was a nasty piece of work and made the entire hospital's lives hell, so when I went in, I overheard a ew nurses talking about me behind my back and snidely asking oh hs he related to that horrible old bitch. Exact, freaking. Words. I flagged down a senior nurse and told them. Next thing I heard was a lot of arguing and about professionalism.

Also, for some insanely funny reason, I managed to befriend the hospital chaplain and debate religion with him. CoE ordained minister debating religious stuff with me, over toast and a cup of tea...and speaking of, I got a running joke in that hospital from the older nurses that I needed a loyalty card that entitled me to a free plate of toast and a cup of hot tea...I was not happy when they ran out of hot tea nd gave me decaffinated tea. Ew.

So...yeah, it's sort of off on a tangent but I wanted o add it to the topic.

Also, for the colors thing that I noticed, I'm actually asked a lot by my parents what color would go good on this room, what do you think of this carpet and so forth. I'm frigging blind, what do I care? (Acutally, I care a lot since I can picture what a room looks like, and I can make out light/dark/etc), and I've always argued that you should open a room up more with colors/painting and suchlike, ya know?

Oh I agreee with that, but I have been keeping up with the research in Russia about it, but I'm curious and not hopeful, if I was offered a new optic nerve and an eye replacement 20 years from now I'd consider it long and hard.

I do think however that certain doctors need to be more cautious in their diagnoses honestly, as I was initially down for a cataract operation...despite never having had cataracts, somehow I got switched with a cataracts operation, which was fixed beforehand thankfully.

I do think though that blindness won't ever be cured, I believe it's part of nature's way of a strong species, sort of making sure the srong of a species survive and don't get too old or too weak really.

Sorry for the long message,
Well, my case is a little bit different; I may not be able to explain it in English, but anyway. I was born not blind, I had full sight in the beginning of my life. In 1997, when I was nearly one and a half year old, I was part of a terrible accident which caused a really awful injury to my mum, I and my brother and father. There was a very problematic situation that year here in Albania, and everything was messy. Schools, universities, public institutions, including hospitals were at an incredibly terrible state. Our country was nearly at war because of the problems caused by the government and criminal bands which were leading our country at that time. Anyway, my family was part of a really bad accident. My mum and I were shot in distance by mistake by two guys who had targeted another person, and we got badly injured. My mum ended in hospital, nearly dead, with less than 2.5 liters of blood remaining in her body, which is 50% of the whole amount of blood in a human's body. My condition, however, was nearly the same, even worse; my face was completely devastated and my eyes, particularly the right one had been severely damaged, starting from the nose. The doctors were not sure whether I'd be able to survive or not, since the condition was really serious. After some treatments, and after receiving an amount of blood from my cousin, I managed (thankfully) to survive. The doctors did whatever was possible to improve the conditions of my eyes and they managed to successfully avoid many issues which would accompany me in a long run. Since that time, I've not had any serious problem with my eyes, though I've had occasional visits to my doctor who examined me when I got injured. I went to Russia in 1998, where I visited a professional oculist. He told me there could be done something to return my sight again, but certainly in the future, and the operation would cost a little bit too much. Now, I do not hopefully have any complications and it's all going well.

I kind of have this theory that blindness at some point won't be relevant to human communication anymore due to technology, so it might be possible that blindness is never cured, and it may very well be ignored eventually in favor for more scalable technological options.

My philosophy on the subject is basically that people all have functions that they can or cannot do, just like any other "engine" would. An engine is anything that is capable of executing abstract functions, such as performing a task. Blindness affects people's ability to perform a task at the same level as sighted people. So, if that function can be achieved through technology instead, blindness is essentially equivalent to vision in that function. Of course, it's never that simple, but an interesting thing to defend my theory - blind people generally out perform sighted people in low vision enviorments. Blind people exist in a unique "mode" than sighted people, and if they lost their vision early enough, their brains are oriented towards using the same "mental capacity" so to speak to process navigation as opposed to vision. This is another reason why losing vision later on in life is so hard.

Even if everyone who was blind pledged never to have children, not all blindness is hereditary. So it would be a fruitless jesture.