In a fast-paced kitchen, Sonny Sweetman couldn’t see people or objects entering his right side peripheral vision until they were too close. “Things were just appearing on that right hand side when normally I would have seen them a while ago,” Sweetman, 53, of Redondo Beach, California, tells TODAY.com.
“I literally thought, ‘Hey, I’m getting older, maybe I need some new glasses.’” After enduring several weeks of blurriness, he finally visited an eye doctor who sent him to a retina specialist who stayed late for Sweetman. “It was like 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon,” he recalls.
“I was like nobody in LA is staying around to help me unless something’s really wrong.” He soon learned what caused his hazy sight — Sweetman had uveal melanoma, an uncommon type of melanoma that develops in the middle layer of the wall of the eye, the uvea, according to the . Sweetman, a professional chef and one-time personal chef to Oprah, thrives in “fast-moving places,” such as the kitchen or LA’s highways.
When the blurriness began in 2022, he thought he needed a new eye prescription. About six to eight weeks after his vision troubles began, he scheduled an appointment with his eye doctor. “I was like, ‘Glasses should fix that,’” he says.
“But I was not correct.” His doctor knew “something was wrong right away,” and stepped out to contact the retina specialist late in the afternoon. That’s when Sweetman knew being middle age likely wasn’t t.