Seeing Is Believing

When I went blind, my girls were determined to help me see again...

By Diane Sample, 34, from Chilton, County Durham

- Emmie Harrison/Kerri Muirhead

Opening my laptop, a picture of my daughters flashed up. 

It was February 2011, my girls Rebecca and Rachel were 8 and 6.

I loved their smiles, their long, blonde hair… 

Then I noticed a grey spot in my left eye. 

Thinking it was dust, I blinked. 

But it didn’t go away, not even rinsing with water helped.

‘It’s so annoying,’ I complained to hubby Lee, then 33.

Days later, I was taking Rachel to pick up glasses from the optician.

On a whim, I mentioned my ‘floater’ to the receptionist.

Luckily, there was an on-call optician there who ran some tests. 

Better safe than sorry. 

He took pictures of the back of my eye. 

‘There’s something there,’ he said.

He suspected something called a vitreous haemorrhage. A blood leak between my lens and retina.

Basically, my eyeball was filling with blood.

‘You need to go to hospital immediately,’ the optician added, warning me not to drive there.

Worried, I tookRachel home, left her with Lee.

My mum June, then 60, drove me to Sunderland Eye Infirmary.

There, tests confirmed I had a haemorrhage.

It was likely brought on by my type 1 diabetes, which I’ve had since I was 9. What did it mean? They couldn’t say. But they

The clever, tiny camera told me I needed laser surgery to burn it out pretty urgently. 

‘Or you might lose your sight,’ they said. 

My girls raced through my mind. 

I couldn’t let that happen. 

Weeks later, I had laser eye surgery.