Goodwill Greeting

I was losing my vision. Was I also losing my hope?

- By ROBERTA MESSNER, Huntington, West Virginia

ALWAYS A WARM WELCOME Joseph Fitzpatrick has worked as a greeter at Roberta's Goodwill store for 11 years.

It should have been a wonderful day, a day to celebrate. The genetic disease that had caused benign craniofacial tumors for most of my life had subsided. My battle with mouth cancer had been declared history after 15 years. Now I was at the ophthalmologist’s office, where a new lens prescription would doubtless fix my niggling vision issue. Id been filling in missing letters of words. Reaching for what I thought was a Winnie the Pooh book and finding out its spine said Winning With People. Moving from window to window to work at my computer. Upgrading light bulbs.

Dr. Skolik’s voice seemed a hundred miles away. As she finished the exam, she gave me the same diagnosis my father had been given three decades earlier: “You have macular degeneration. The wet kind. The worst.”

Because of my dad, I knew all about the disease. How abnormal blood vessels grow and leak blood and fluid, attacking the macula, the part of the retina responsible for sharp central vision. It’s the leading cause of blindness in older adults.