If you scroll back about 2 days worth I made a post asking about how people dealt with losing vision where I brought up my personal case, don't really feel like trying to retype and explain that all right here.

That's happening to me now.

My vision was 20/20 in one eye and 20/25 in the other two years ago when the symptoms first began. I was declared legally blind in July and I've gotten a lot worse since then. Nobody knows when I'll be unable to see any light at all but I estimate it will happen between a year and two years from now.

I have a very rare form of a not so rare disease called retinitus pigmentosa, or RP. RP affects about 1 in 4,000 people, but there are over 160 kinds of RP that we know of and probably at least that many more that we don't know of yet. Whatever kind of RP I have is rare enough that my genetic test didn't match anything in the RP database. The doctor said it's possible the mutation began with me since nobody else in my family has it and it's such a rare type. And no, the Marvel Cinematic Universe hasn't called yet.

RP usually manifests in teenagers and young adults. Mine didn't show up until I was in my fifties. RP usually takes about thirty years to make a person totally blind but mine is on track to finish the job in about three.

The last time my visual acuity was checked was about two months ago, and it was still 20/20 in one eye and 20/25 in the other. RP hasn't messed with that at all. What it's done is narrowed my field of vision well past the point of legal blindness and overlaid everything I see with dark tv static. My field of vision seems to have stabilized at about 12 degrees horizontally and 8 or 9 degrees vertically, but the static continues to grow darker. Noticeably darker, to the point that every week the grocery store and the dance club seem darker than the week before, and sometimes even the kitchen and the bathroom seem darker than they did just a day before.

These is no cure. RP is genetic, just like eye color and height are genetic. There's no pill a midget can take to grow, there's no pill a brown eyed person can take to turn their eyes blue. The cells in my retina are dying and gene splicing technology like CRISPR isn't able to fix that yet. Even if it could, the cells that have already died are, well, they're already dead. The most I could hope for from a genetic breakthrough is that my eyesight won't continue to get worse, and if it doesn't happen within two years it will be too late to help me.

But that's okay. Technology can't return my eyesight but it can certainly help me live a full, rewarding life without it. My phone reads text messages aloud to me, my laptop reads web pages aloud, the grocery store can deliver food to my front door, my kids get a kick out of driving me around, and my wife and I still dance to The Cure and Depeche Mode every weekend. Other than not having a job anymore I'm honestly surprised at just how little going blind had changed my day to day life.

I was blinded completely from a gunshot when I was 8.

I refer to myself as a very low partial because I'm not quite as low as just light perception, but my useable vision is basically nothing. Outside of arms reach, my ability to see anything at all is extremely low.

I've got optic nerve atrophy from increased intracranial pressure, from Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension.