To the editor:

On June 8, my left eye collapsed: think grape to raisin.

My left eye is my only sighted eye. It’s my “good eye.” Glaucoma stole the vision in my right eye many years ago.

Glaucoma is a disease where the fluid inside the eye exerts too much pressure on the optic nerve—killing it slowly. The surgical drain that had maintained a healthy pressure in my left eye for 24 years suddenly failed. I had no optic pressure at all. I could barely see shadows and light. I was afraid.

After successful emergency surgery to seal this drain, my sight slowly returned. 

By mid-July, all seemed well. Until I woke one morning and noticed a small, black shadow at the top of my field of vision. It went away and I dismissed it—until I awoke a few days later while on vacation: the shadow was now a veil slowly drawing down over my world.

I immediately called my glaucoma specialist from Vermont:

“Kevin, bad things don’t go away,” he told me.

It turned out to be a detached retina, most likely caused by the collapse. In five days, I was in another operating room in Boston. I had a 20 percent chance of losing the sight in my one “good” eye. I was terrified.

One morning during my long recovery from this second surgery, I awoke to the sounds of automatic gunfire and people screaming. It was Oct. 2, the morning after the mass shooting in Las Vegas which left 59 people dead and 489 injured. I couldn’t see the video footage being shown on television, but the sound, the distinctive, persistent staccato popping of automatic rounds as 22,000 people ran for their lives was terrifying.

For us to believe that the next “deadliest mass shooting” in the United States is not just around the corner is the worst kind of blindness. Since Las Vegas, there have been 75 mass shootings in our country, including the massacre at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, in which 26 people, including a pregnant woman, were executed by a lone gunman, and 20 more were injured.

I believe bad things don’t go away—and these are very bad things. We owe it to ourselves to see clearly what is happening in our nation right before our eyes and take steps to end the carnage.

Ultimately, my recovery was successful. My fear is that America has gone blind.

Kevin Blanchard

Barrington

Editor's note: This essay originally was broadcast in a slightly different form on This I Believe New England on RINPR.