The Degenerates

This morning I woke up from a dream about a group I briefly belonged to, The Degenerates. Nope, not a metal band :) but a bunch of people like me with Stargardt disease .... or fundus flavimaculatus, a genetically inherited juvenile macular degeneration that causes progressive vision loss usually to the point of legal blindness.

I thought I'd post a couple of photos I found on Google that show what we degenerates see when we look at stuff ....





So I do have peripheral vision, but the area that is missing (for me, it's not black or gray like in these photos, but multicolored) follows whatever I focus on - the macula of the retina is where vision is focused, and that's what's degenerating. This makes it hard to read, to draw, to see objects (like on-coming vehicles) or people's faces ....



... and one gets into the weird habit of not looking at what one's trying to see, so you can still see it sort of. I quit The Degenerates after only a few meetings - we didn't have much in common aside from the eye disease and to be honest, it creeped me out to see myself replicated in all these other degenerating people. I hope tonight I dream about Kermit instead :)