‘I was 29 when road signs became blurry – within a decade I was completely blind’

I t was in April 2009, at the age of just 29, that I had my first stroke . Six months later, in September, I had another one. That November, once I was back at work, I was driving home one day and realised I couldn’t quite see the road signs.

I wore glasses then, so I just assumed my prescription had changed. I booked an appointment with the optician. They could see something in my eye and sent me to A&E.

When they looked at my eyes, they saw that my rods and cones – the eye’s light receptors – had been affected by my stroke. When they did more tests, they saw there were lots of different diseases attacking my eyes. The core cells were gradually dying.

Doctors predicted that, by the age of 40, I would potentially be completely blind . Even with all the different diagnoses, I was told that, while my core vision would continue deteriorating, my peripheral vision should stay intact. But in 2013 I started noticing patches of this were going as well.

That’s when they took my driving licence off me. For the next four years, it was a progressive deterioration; all my core cells were dying. On the first day of November 2017, I woke up with very, very little vision: no core vision whatsoever, and the tiniest amount in the top left hand corner of my peripheral field.

I saw my ophthalmologist the same day and she confirmed that all the cells had died. That was it. This was now my vision.

That’s when I was registered blind. I was a single mum with a nine-year-old daughter whe.