Eyes After Forty

Patricia Whitfield

Writes for Eyes After Forty

About

Thirty years as a high school English teacher in suburban Portland. The job was literally reading -- novels assigned, student essays annotated, papers graded in red pen at the kitchen table after dinner until the stack was gone. I took that part of the work seriously. I also had perfect vision for forty-eight years, which I had come to treat as a permanent condition.

The morning I could not read my own whiteboard from five feet away was when I first noticed something had shifted. I was checking a date I had written for the class -- some deadline that needed to be visible from the back row -- and the handwriting was blurry. I had to walk up and lean in to confirm what I had written. Twenty-three ninth graders watched this. The indignity was considerable. The vision clinic confirmed what I had already started to suspect.

Within two years I owned four pairs of reading glasses placed in different rooms of the house, because I kept setting a pair down and needing another one before I could locate the first. My eye doctor mentioned macular health at a routine exam -- specifically that paying attention to it earlier rather than later makes a real difference -- and that conversation sent me somewhere I hadn't planned to go. I started researching supplements. Found the available information hard to evaluate. Kept a journal instead, noting what I tried and what I noticed through five different supplements over roughly two years.

Not a doctor. Not a nutritionist. Not an eye care professional in any capacity. A retired English teacher who has been taking careful notes since her first year in the classroom and finds this subject worth writing about plainly.

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Disclosure

Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only share eye supplements that are part of my own daily routine. Commission has no effect on what I report -- if something showed no change, the post says so.