When you get hit, as an adult, with something like RP, you inevitably start to reflect on your past and possible signs that might have been there to indicate something was amiss; both physical and psychic signs.  As a child, I was obsessed with Little House on the Prairie.  I loved the little schoolhouse and the joy of life’s daily triumphs, but I really got hooked when Mary started going blind.  I remember watching as a kid and waiting with bated breath during the week between shows.  I needed to know what was going to happen to Mary.  Would she need new glasses?  Would she have to go to the big city on the train to see the specialist?  Would she go blind?  I felt somehow connected to her plight and I had no idea why.

Years later, in my late teens and early twenties, I started watching Little House re-runs with my friend Lisa.  We would drink cheap wine and smoke cigarettes and watch Mary going blind over and over again.  At the time, we both concluded that going blind was definitely preferable to going deaf because a life without being able to listen to music seemed to be pretty much not worth living.  And, blind chicks got to have hot blind husbands like Adam (Mary’s husband).

Little did we know I would be facing the reality of going blind just a decade later.  Maybe I unconsciously knew that blindness would weave itself into the fabric of my future as it had woven itself into the fabric of my childhood fantasies.  Or maybe I just loved the drama.