Diabetes can wreak havoc on many parts of the body, including the eyes, but people with diabetes aren’t doomed to have vision problems.
With good blood sugar management and regular eye exams, many eye conditions can be prevented or treated, experts say.
Patricia Welter, a Pilates studio owner from Palm Harbor, Fla., wishes she’d known more about preventing eye problems related to diabetes before it was too late. She was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at 14, and lost one of her eyes because of diabetes when she was in her 40s.
“I was always scared to death of eye complications and blindness from diabetes,” Welter shares. Her uncle and her mother both had type 1 diabetes and had vision issues from the disease. But Welter was diagnosed in the 1970s before a lot of advances had been made in treating diabetes and diabetic eye disease.
“Looking back, I saw signs. I started getting blurry vision and would see little dots. If I had been diagnosed and treated earlier for my eye disease, maybe I wouldn’t have lost my eye,” she adds.
When she was in her 40s, Welter started experiencing bleeding in her retina (the part of the eye that senses light and sends visual messages to the brain). She saw an eye doctor and had laser surgery performed in both eyes. Then one day she saw flashes in her left eye. The doctors diagnosed a retinal detachment. She had three surgeries to try to save the eye, but had a stroke during the third surgery and lost her left eye.
RELATED: 10 Ways Your Eyes Are Telling You Something Is Wrong
“I really felt sorry for myself the first few months,” she says. But her boyfriend (now her husband) pushed her to get active again, to return to Pilates. He also challenged her to complete a half marathon, which they did together.
Welter says she hasn’t let the loss of her eye stop her in any way. “It’s part of my being now,” she adds.
In addition to having diabetic retinopathy, she also developed an early cataract — another concern for people with diabetes. Cataracts cause