When I woke up one
morning four years ago,
everything was black.
I couldn’t see a thing.
I thought, ‘Maybe I
haven’t actually woken
up yet? Maybe I’ll lay
here a little longer...’
But after some time,
I woke my wife
Dearne and said,
“Look, you better
get me to the hospital.
I can’t see. Everything’s
totally black.”Let me go back to
the beginning...
Approximately 30 years
ago, when I was in my early 20s,
I was diagnosed with insulin-
dependent diabetes. We believe
I’d had diabetes for longer than
that, but that was the first time
someone had picked it up.
But it wasn’t until the end of
2014 that everything started to
change.
Although I was wearing glasses,
I’d had no previous issues with
my sight. This meant I didn’t
get my eyes tested as often as
I should have. Despite people
telling me to get them checked,I just never took them seriously
that I could possibly go blind. But
waking up to absolute darkness is
the most horrifying thing you
could go through.
Losing your vision means you
can’t do the simple things in life- like seeing a baby smile. Things
that you were once passionate
about, you can’t do anymore.
I was very, very passionate
about coaching soccer, cricket,
football and athletics, but you
can’t coach if you can’t see an
athlete. It’s that simple.
The doctors found massive
bleeds behind both of my eyes,
caused by my diabetes – it was
one of those things where it all
happened in one hit. This was
followed by a silent heart attack - a heart attack without any pain
or noticeable symptoms – which
killed the blood vessels in my left
eye completely, meaning there’s
no vision out of my left side at all
anymore. While my right eye also
fell into darkness from the bleeds,
after some time I began to see
black and white again. It’s blurry,
like looking at shadows, which
makes things pretty bloody
difficult to be honest with you,
but it is something.
TYPE (^2)
The last thing I
saw was my
wife’s face
Neil Hansell,
type 2, went to
bed one night
with normal
vision. When
he woke up,
the world had
turned dark
my story: type 2