hi I'm Mark musinski I'm 29 years old
and I'm going
blind I was born with a genetic mutation
to my abca4 Gene which caused conrod
distrophy um which is a form of macular
degeneration we didn't know initially we
found out when I was in kindergarten and
they make you do the vision test where
you have to say if the Red Dot is inside
or outside of the box and I I didn't
know that there was a box even they
eventually brought me to Dr Fishman
who's one of the leading opthalmologists
and he was able to diagnose conrod
distrophy so what I see is um the
central vision is a sort of a blurred
mishmash of colors that is
indistinguishable and then around that
the rest of it pretty bad too uh and
each individual eye they're both have a
different depth of vision so one is 2400
and the other is 2,800 so if you can
imagine like having one eye in a
magnifying glass and one eye not in a
magnifying glass and trying to walk
around like that um they're constantly
fighting for
Focus part of the issue with my eyes is
that they're extra light sensitive so if
you can imagine going outside and
everything is super
bright not being able to see well it
affects so many other parts of your life
that you don't even think about uh
assume you're standing at a crosswalk
and depending on the lighting and if
there's trees blocking stuff you can't
see what color the different street
lights are and if there's no cars you're
just looking at the person next to you
and thinking is this person going to
risk their life to cross the street do
they have a Death
Wish uh I think my natural enemy is the
fire hydrant especially here in Los
Angeles where they make them yellow for
some stupid reason uh sometimes it's
hard to tell the difference between the
lotion and the conditioner at
Hotel the most common thing I get
nowadays is are people asking me if I'm
smelling my phone so I've got the text
size as large as it can go so for me to
read it I have to do something like this
I've learned to like look at people when
I'm talking to them but the tough part
is then I can't see their face so I
don't know if they're happy at what I'm
saying if they're really upset at what
I'm saying I have to guess based on
their intonation or I have to find some
excuse to like look at a poster over
there so that I can get them into my
periphery and get a better sense of
what's going on I think it's also given
me a weird perspective you know I know
there's lots of things I can't do so I
can just let them go there's lots of
things in everyone's life that are
negative or that prevent them from doing
something they might want to do and some
of those things you can fix with hard
work and and by having other people help
you and some of those things you can't
and in the end you know I don't know I
wouldn't have the friends that I have I
wouldn't have the same relationship with
my family I guess I'd rather have me the
way that I am than have great eyesight
and the chance of not having all of
these things I have right now that I
love
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