Cataracts

I am the Amberlady and I have cataracts.

Like many people I always thought of cataracts as being a disease of the elderly so when my eyesight began to deteriorate in my late forties I went into denial.  I had been bothered by glare from brights lights and sunshine for a while so I'd spent a fortune on new spectacles with anti-glare & react-a-light coatings, but withing a few months I was struggling to read with them and glare, especially when driving was still a problem but there was no way I was going to admit, especially to my partner that those expensive specs had been a waste of money.
Over the next few months my eyesight continued to worsen, bright lights developed a halo around them and I had to give up driving as anything more then a 200 meters away disappeared into a fuzzy fog, from which other road users suddenly appeared out of nowhere,   At this time I was having other health issues and a rare side of effect of my drugs was distorted vision so I blamed my eyesight on them, although I never mentioned it to my doctor.
The crunch came when I realised I could no longer make out the faces of people across the street, glare was now almost crippling, going out in bright sunlight was light staring into a thousand suns as any reflective surface dazzled me then finally I closed my left eye for some reason and to my shock realised I see virtually nothing with the other eye, it was as though a opaque smudge was obscuring my central vision. Finally I plucked up the courage to go to an optician and was told what I already suspected. My right eye has an advanced cataract and my left eye is in the early stages.
So at the moment I am waiting to see a specialist who hopefully will refer me for cataract surgery which I have learnt has evolved out of all recognition over the last few years, the operation takes less then half-an-hour and there is a good chance that my eyesight afterwards will be better then it has been for years - this story will continue

An informative site on cataracts