Hillary’s Story

My name is Hillary Golden. I was diagnosed with normal tension glaucoma in July of 2020. I had a stye and I was furloughed from my job at the time, so I had time to go see the eye doctor. The optometrist come in the room and when she looked inside my eyes, she said, “I don’t like the look of your nerve.” We did some more tests and she sent me to a glaucoma specialist and at that point I had lost almost 40% of my sight.

With normal tension glaucoma, it is a lot harder to diagnose because you don’t have that red flag of high pressure, so it takes longer and the damage is usually worse by the time you get diagnosed. It’s also a very sneaky disease because as you’re losing sight, your brain is filling in data, so you don’t know you’re losing sight. I describe missing sight as like a puzzle, there’s always missing pieces, right? You can still tell what the puzzle is, but you can’t see all the details of the puzzle.

There’s  so many different eye diseases and our vision is so precious. It is within your power to take care of yourself. And it’s very important to do everything you can in order to take care of yourself. if you can save your vision and your sight, you should try to do it.

I have five nieces and nephews and my oldest nephew plays professional baseball. So, it’s so important for me not to just see his baseball games, but to see my nieces get married one day, to see my younger nephews graduate from college, see what they’re going to do with their lives. And so, to me, seeing is so much more than sight.

I never thought glaucoma could affect me because I thought glaucoma only affected you if you were In your 80s and a grandparent. At any age you can be diagnosed with glaucoma, so that’s why regular eye exams are so important. There are preventative measures, there are treatments, and it’s such a precious gift that we really need to take better care of our eyes.