Out of Sight

For 15 years, she assumed she was permanently blind. Then she got a second opinion.

- Luc Rinaldi

MEDICAL MYSTERY

IN THE MID-'90s, Connie Parke and her husband, Rob, settled in Anaconda, a tiny town tucked into the mountains of western Montana. When Parke, a mother of four, wasn't bartending or working security at a hot springs resort, she volunteered her time driving cash-strapped families the 12-hour round trip to the children's hospital in Salt Lake City. Parke had experienced her own fair share of medical problems over the years: in the 1980s and 1990s, she beat uterine, ovarian and breast cancer, as well as lymphoma. By the early 2000s, she was, miraculously, in good health.

But one evening in 2003, while Parke, then in her early 40s, was driving back from Utah, she started seeing strange halos around tail lights and street lamps. "Wow, I must be tired," she thought to herself. She'd worn glasses since she was six; she reasoned that she might need a new prescription.

The next day, when Parke visited her optometrist, the tests he ran were alarming. She couldn't see him wave his hand at the edge of her view, which meant she was losing her peripheral vision. He suggested it could be glaucoma, a group of eye diseases that damage the optic nerves. The condition is often caused by a buildup of pressure in the eye, which can lead to blindness within a few years s if left untreated.

By the time Parke saw an ophthalmologist, three weeks later, her field of view was already murkier and narrower. The eye doctor agreed that it looked like glaucoma, but medicated eye drops, a typical glaucoma treatment, didn't help, so Parke decided to consult more specialists around Montana and Utah. She wondered if her past chemotherapy was behind her vision problems, but the doctors dismissed it; it wouldn't manifest years later. No one offered her a definitive answer or a treatment that would prevent her vision from getting worse.