I’ve gone completely blind from glaucoma. For me, it’s a big blur of colors, reds and greens and blues mostly, that shift and change. It’s kind of cool actually, except that it’s keeping me from seeing anything.

My doctor said that since my optic nerve has been messed up, my brain is trying to compensate, and that just results in a bunch of colors.

It is is sneaky though. Didn’t even realize I couldn’t see at all through part of my left eye or at all out of my right until my doctor ran some tests.

My boyfriend has a variation of glaucoma, he says everything is just graying out. He can make out bright colours if he’s close enough. He can no longer identify faces unless he’s close up. His depth perception is pretty much shot. We still go to movies but we sit in the front row. Action movies are a waste of time but something slower paced is OK

I think it would be great if someone could design masks that give wearers an idea of what the different vision losses involve.

Most times you don’t notice when your losing peripheral vision. It’s like looking through a tube and not noticing the tube is getting smaller. Glaucoma is sneaky, people tend to be unaware they’re moving their heads {instead of the eyes} for full vision.
A couple of different times, I’ve been witnessed to patients who aren’t aware of vision loss until one eye is covered.

Hope this helps

I was born with it, and for as long as I can remember I had no vision, so there was no actual progression to map. If I had vision at all, it was when I was way too young to remember. That being said, I had more surgeries to attempt to correct it than I care to admit, with no result. My retinas detached as a result of my glaucoma, and there was extensive damage to the optic nerve in my right eye (possibly related). For that reason, even 35 years later the chances of me gaining sight are remote at best.

Relatedly, this is why for some blind people at least one eye appears smaller than it should. My right eye is teeny tiny in comparison to my left. If they could repair the damage to my left eye I'd probably gain some useable vision. There'd be nothing they could do for my right.

The first thing to know is that sight changes, be it sight loss or gain, is different for everyone. What Glaucoma looks like for one person is likely not what it looks like for another person. It will look different for a person going from 20/20 sight than it does for a person who wears glasses going from 20/100.

That is the trouble with attempting to simulate sight loss through items. Sight is a spectrum, like almost all things, and there are various parts that make up the accumulated whole we know as sight.

There is distance-viewing, depth perception, color perception, night vision, and visual field. Any one of these is its own spectrum that determines how much any one person can see in each of those different areas. The compilation of those various spectra is what puts a person somewhere on the sight spectrum. This is why I have a hard time answering the questions "How much can you see?" and "How well can you see?"

There is no short answer, and I generally give a short summary of each of the spectra I mentioned before.

I'll say something like "I can't see clearly more than two feet. Anything beyond that is just color and moving objects. I have no night vision and no peripheral vision, so it's like I'm looking through a tunnel."

This brings me to the simulation you viewed about the black circle with the growing border. The circle is not stupid. What it does is show you the mechanics of Glaucoma. Some people like to know the mechanics of how they or someone they know is losing their vision. Sometimes, it helps them better understand what they need to do in order to function with their diminishing sight. I will grant that the simulation of the mechanics does not show the actual experience of what it is like to lose your sight to Glaucoma. This is the question you want answered, and I've just told you that it's not the same for everyone.

That said, another thing to know about Glaucoma is that there are two types. There is Open-Angle Glaucoma and Closed-Angle Glaucoma. One of them is more common, painless and earning itself the title of The Silent Thief. The other causes pain, alerting you to the fact it is there, but likely not before it has taken some sight. I don't know which is the one that causes pain and which one does not.

Here is my experience, with perfect hindsight as only the past can give us. I had the painless type of Glaucoma. One day, when I was twelve, I crashed my bike into a parked pickup truck. I just turned away and kept on riding. I didn't notice anything different about my sight, but I, now, know that was the first sign of a loss of depth perception. That means I had Glaucoma long enough for it to steal away part of my sight.

When I was thirteen, I got a new pair of glasses. They worked fine when I got them. Several months later, I needed a magnifying glass to read regular print while wearing the glasses. This was another obvious sign of something being wrong, but I didn't know and my mother was too wrapped up in herself to pay attention when I needed her.

The next obvious sign was when I was two months shy of my seventeenth birthday. It was around Halloween. I began to have flashes where my vision would turn all white or all black, like flashing lights. I told my mother and she thought I wasn't eating enough protein, so she fed me chicken and told me to tell her if it was still happening.

It was by some chance of luck--for I don't remember why she was at the hospital, probably for my kid brother with Sickle Cell Anemia--but she ended up meeting a woman whose baby daughter was born with Glaucoma. She took me to the hospital that night and got me checked out.

One of the doctors said I would have been totally blind in three days if she had not brought me in. Three days, and there would have been nothing left to save. That is probably why I can't see out of my left eye. They did surgery on my right eye then waited days to do surgery on my left eye.

So, what is Glaucoma, mechanically? Glaucoma is the name of a condition where something malfunctions within the drainage system of the eye. There is a liquid-jelly type substance that gives the eye its shape. Without us knowing it, the level of the amount of that substance is regulated by a circulation of flowing and draining. This allows what is known as the eye pressure to remain stable. Think of it like a balloon filling with water and air. The reason a balloon pops when it is overfilled is because there is no way for the air and water to drain at a steady rate. The same thing happens with tires. If you put air in a tire and it feels full but the tire looks like some of the air has drained out over time or through use, there is a tiny hole in that tire somewhere that is allowing the air to flow out. With no air going into the tire as it is flowing out, the tire deflates. Same principle as eye pressure.

Normal eye pressure is between eight and sixteen. It's okay to be stable at four or twenty, but those are the limits and doctors don't want you to be outside of those parameters. Eye pressure is important because it is a sign of how well the drainage system of the eyes are working. If the pressure is too high, the eye will push so hard on the optic nerve that it cuts off the blood flow and begins to kill the nerve through blood starvation. If the pressure is too low, I imagine the eye begins to collapse and damage the retina or other parts of the eye.

You can have a different pressure number for each eye. When I had active Glaucoma, before the surgeries, the pressure in my right eye was thirty and the pressure in my left eye was fifty. It's a likelihood that there might not have been anything in my left eye to save even without the surgery, but there was hope. They waited a couple days to perform surgery on my left eye after giving me medicine they hoped would bring the pressure down to a safer level to perform surgery on.

Perhaps you might have noticed that the painless type of Glaucoma doesn't present many noticeable signs. It usually happens over a period of years with sight loss occurring in tiny increments until the loss or the signs are so obvious that you go to the doctor to get it checked out. By then, it's been too late for a long time. Glaucoma is something you want to actively be tested for on a regular basis as a preventive measure. The sight lost cannot be gotten back. It doesn't recover.

As far as I could tell, while losing my vision, I didn't notice unless I had to read something. I was born with cataracts and have had bad vision my whole life. I couldn't really tell something was wrong until I was thirteen, but I didn't know and I trusted my mother.

On a less serious note, movie theaters have audio description headsets where a track of someone describing the actions sighted people can see is layered between the dialogue of the characters. If a person is not too proud and are willing to learn how to adjust to audio described movies, action films would not be out of reach.

I was diagnosed with it super young and they have been maintaining my pressure with drops since. Thankfully because it was caught very quick and monitored i havent had any loss