About Eyes After Forty

I had 20/20 vision for forty-eight years. My eye doctor mentioned it at every annual exam like a small personal record being maintained. Then one morning in my third-period English class I could not read the whiteboard I had just written on. I walked up and squinted at my own handwriting from two feet away while twenty-three ninth graders watched. Not a moment I had anticipated.

The decline after that was fast enough to feel personal. Within two years I owned four pairs of reading glasses in different rooms of the house because I could never find whichever pair I had last used. One for the kitchen table. One for the nightstand. One in my bag. One unaccounted for at any given time. My eye doctor confirmed the change at a routine exam and mentioned macular health -- specifically that paying attention to it early mattered more than most people realized. That conversation sent me somewhere I hadn't expected to go.

I spent thirty years as a high school English teacher in suburban Portland. Reading was literally the job -- novels assigned, student essays annotated late at night, papers graded in red pen until the stack was gone. When I started looking into eye supplements I found the available information inconsistent and hard to evaluate. So I started a journal and kept notes through five supplements over two years, recording what I noticed each time in plain language without trying to sound more scientific than I am.

This site is those notes. Not a doctor, not a nutritionist, not an eye care professional in any capacity. A retired English teacher who spent thirty years reading novels and is not interested in stopping.

Find out who writes here on the author page.

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