When Doug Morris lost vision in his right eye three years ago, he adjusted, and life went on. Then last year, NAION, also known as an optic nerve stroke, affected his other eye.
That’s when Doug says he joined “an unpopular club that no one wants to join.” And while he has a sense of humor about it, it was a dark time.
“When I first joined the club, I was a mental and emotional wreck,” he recalls. “Depression, anxiety, panic attacks, no sleep, fear and uncertainty about the future.”
For a while, Doug put his energy into trying to leave the club. Then Doug took a friend’s advice and checked out the Hadley website. When the site offered him text size and contrast settings right off the bat, he knew “these guys are serious.”
Doug kept coming back, both for answers to everyday questions and to set the tone for his day with the Insights & Sound Bites podcast, hearing other people describe how they were adapting. “These were my people, and I can learn from them,” he says.
He also joined Adjusting & Coping Together, a weekly virtual support group where people with vision loss work through challenges together and mark the obstacles they’ve overcome. “That just turbocharged the positive trajectory I was on,” he says.
Doug’s wife, Beth, shares her husband’s sense of humor. “I became an associate member of the club,” she says. But Beth was struggling, too, and in ways she hadn’t fully realized.
She had poured herself into helping Doug through his anger and grief, setting her own feelings aside. Even as Doug began moving forward, Beth says she was “running on empty.” It took a serious car accident, caused by a moment of absent-mindedness, for her to see that she needed help, too.
Beth found a therapist, but “there was still a kind of gap.” So, when Hadley began offering a support group for family and friends of people living with vision loss, she jumped at the chance to join.
“The biggest gift was realizing that I needed to prioritize my own self-care,” she said. “The group also gave me something that no individual therapy could provide. It was that shared experience.”
Doug and Beth came to Hadley needing different things. They found the same answer: people who understood.
And they know that Hadley’s donors helped make that possible.
“They should know that those of us in the club truly appreciate what you do,” Doug says.
Beth puts it simply: “We’re deeply grateful.”