BLIND RAGE OVER GLAUCOMA DIAGNOSES

If only somebody had shown me how easy it was to make appointments with doctors, I would most likely have better vision today. Beginning in September of 1973, my left eye had periodic episodes of fogginess with rainbows appearing around lights. I warned Mum about it but she postponed making an appointment. After a year, she still hadn't sent me to a doctor.

While reading a textbook with the closed circuit TV reader in the school library one January afternoon, I had an increasingly painful headache. Using my left eye instead of my right didn't help matters either. After an hour, my patience gave out. "I know I'll get a bad grade but this reading assignment is killing me," I thought as I turned off the machine and walked out of the library..

I lay down on my bed as soon as I arrived in my room and slept for two hours. When I awoke, the vision in both eyes was foggy. The right eye cleared up the next morning but the left one didn't. When I told Mum that weekend about what happened, she promised to call the doctor.

Five months later, Mum made the appointment and I visited an ophthalmologist. "You've got glaucoma," the doctor informed me after measuring my eye pressures. "Take these drops in both eyes twice a day and see me in a month or so."

When the pharmacist at a nearby drug store filled my prescription, the price for such a tiny bottle of liquid astonished me. Even so, I carefully followed the doctor's instructions. The foggy episodes in my right eye stopped and the headaches went away but I could barely see with my left one.

"How did your doctor appointment go?" Sister R asked as I walked into her kitchen through the back door the next Wednesday afternoon.

She turned to check the supper cooking on the stove as I said, "The doctor says I've got glaucoma."

She whirled around, shook her finger in my face, and bellowed, "You lost your healing! Brother H laid his hands specially on you and prayed and you had to lose your faith!"

I was so unprepared for this verbal assault that I remained speechless throughout her five-minute tirade. "How could I know that I'd be diagnosed with glaucoma?" I thought. With all the willpower I could muster, I resisted the urge to turn and storm out the door, never to return.

Throughout the meal and the meeting afterward, I fumed inwardly at the utter unfairness of the situation. My mind was so preoccupied that I scarcely heard what Brother H taught.

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The previous paragraphs came from my How I Was Razed manuscript. They demonstrate the cruelty of the name-it-and-claim-it faith healing cults and my earnest desire to be cured of my poor vision. God willing, I hope to have this memoir in print by November. My desire is that it will comfort, edify, and encourage those who were wounded spiritually in similar aberrant churches.

In addition to this upcoming book, I've written When a Man Loves a Rabbit (Learning and Living With Bunnies), a collection of delightful and poignant tales of my life with house rabbits. I also wrote Deliverance From Jericho (Six Years in a Blind School), an exposé of life in a government institution and the way being there effected me. Descriptions of both memoirs, plus a paragraph about my freelance writing work, are on my PayPal-equipped InScribe page. E-mail me for further information or if you don't have PayPal but still wish to place an order.