It was like any other Friday night: after a long, busy working day, New York Times Columnist Frank Bruni went out for dinner and drinks to welcome the weekend. When he woke up the next morning, he immediately noticed some blurred vision. “I thought maybe some guns got into my eyes overnight, or maybe it’s extra glass of wine,” he shared in this episode of the MindbodyGreen podcast. As the days go by, it becomes blurred, and Bruni finally goes to the eye doctor to have it examined-maybe he can snatch some eye drops.
“My eye doctor told me it looked like something serious and I should go to a neuro-ophthalmologist,” he explained. “On that trip, I was told that I probably had a stroke of the optic nerve, that I would never see normally again with my right eye, and that I would live longer with the significant risk of the same thing. Happening to my left eye … I woke up with a strangely blurred vision, and five days later, I was originally told I might be blind. Occurs in one of the Americans.
As he dived into the diagnosis, Bruni learned to reshape his own priorities and to gain knowledge from others who had gone through a similar unseen illness – as he shared in his book, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found, Being almost blind actually helped him see more clearly. Here’s how Bruni learned to manage her condition: