Whether you live with someone or not, the role of caregiver can be all-consuming. But like they say before takeoff: Put your oxygen mask on first. In other words, you can’t care for others if you don’t care for yourself.
I tell people that the outlook for treatment is promising. Just like when our first therapy came out for wet AMD, and five years later we got another therapy that blew the old one out of the water, I suspect that’s what we’re going to start to see here.
— Sharon Solomon, MD
Professor of ophthalmology, Wilmer Eye Institute; professor of ophthalmology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Expert View
If you have geographic atrophy, what’s most important is to think about what you actually like to do and how you want to stay connected. There are low vision modifications you can do for pretty much everything. Even if it’s difficult, we can usually make it work if it’s something important to you.
— Judith Goldstein, OD
Director of the Lions Vision Research & Rehabilitation Center; associate professor of ophthalmology, Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute; Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
My Experience
[Social media] is where I first heard that new drugs were coming down the line. And like other people in the geographic atrophy community, that news felt monumental. I know there’s no way to reverse my vision loss but knowing there’s a new treatment out there has given me a new lease on life.
— Margret Krakauer
Diagnosed with geographic atrophy in her 70s
Advocacy
I could kick myself now because my husband and I could have done a better job, we think, in helping my parents if we’d just known about all the low vision adaptive tools and techniques we could’ve tried.
