28/05/2026
I’ve just sat reading medical letters written about me in 1987.
I was 2 and a half years old.
Two and a half!
As an adult, you read words like: “painful blind eye” “microphthalmos” “glaucoma” “enucleation”
…but then it suddenly hits you.
That wasn’t written about the woman I am now.
That was written about a toddler.
A little girl who had no understanding of why hospitals, operations and artificial eyes were becoming her normal.
People have always seen the adult who “gets on with it.”
The adult who drives, works, trains people, laughs, copes, adapts.
What they haven’t seen is the lifetime behind that adaptation.
Living every single day with:
half the visual field people with two eyes have
no true depth perception
the exhaustion of constantly scanning environments differently
the self-consciousness
the comments
the “but you’ve got another one”
And I think people say that because they genuinely don’t understand.
Because if you handed your healthy 2-year-old child over for eye removal surgery… you would understand instantly that this is not “just cosmetic. ”This is not something a child simply “gets over.”
Your brain develops around it. Your confidence develops around it. Your identity develops around it.
And yet somehow… that little girl still grew up. Still built resilience. Still learned to navigate the world differently. Still found ways to connect with people, help people and keep moving forward.
Honestly, reading those records today made me emotional because for the first time in a long time, I stopped looking at myself through the lens of “you manage well.”
And started thinking: Bloody hell… look what that child actually adapted to.
If this reaches another parent, another child, or another adult quietly living with sight loss, prosthetics or lifelong adaptation… I hope you know your experience is real, valid and far bigger than what people see on the surface.
