Eye Can’t See

But I have a prosthetic eyeball now

Last month, I wore my pirate patch to a friend’s wedding. As soon as I arrived, a friend of the bride’s grabbed my shoulder.

“I wear one too, a lot of the time,” she confessed, opening her purse to show me the patch. “I’m blind in my eye!”

We sat and talked for a long time. Though both of her eyes looked normal to me, she told me she’s had 12 surgeries on her right eye. It all started after her five-year-old punched her in the face. Which led to a retinal detachment. Then she found out she has a rare disorder where her body forms excess scar tissue. The excess scaring has been devastating for her eye.

She hasn’t been able to drive since the problem first arose. And her vision is so occluded that she suffers from debilitating headaches and nausea.

Ocular melanoma

I was diagnosed definitively with ocular melanoma by an ocular oncologist in the middle of May.

Hoping to avoid surgery, I immediately started following Dr. Max Gerson’s anti-cancer protocol, which I combined with Chinese herbal medicine, eye exercises, and talk therapy in addition to several cancer-busting natural remedies (including eating apricot kernels, which contain a compound, amygdalin, which has been found to stop melanoma, something I’ll write more about in another article).

I was determined to shrink the large tumor myself and regain my sight.

But—perhaps because the tumor was defusing like a melting ice cube or perhaps because it was growing too quickly—less than a month after the ocular oncologist confirmed my cancer diagnosis,