Men Losing – By Tahna Weston
Men Losing Sight Glaucoma
tahna.weston@antiguaobserver
A veteran optometrist with nearly four decades of experience is raising the alarm about a pattern that continues to trouble her — men are losing their sight to glaucoma at disproportionately high rates, not because the disease favours them, but because they refuse to get tested.
Dr Jillia Bird who heard the statistics being framed as men being more susceptible to glaucoma moved quickly to correct the record. The real issue, she said, is attitude — and it is a defiance she has encountered time and again, even when she has gone out of her way to bring eye care directly to men in their own spaces.
She first placed the wider crisis in perspective, delivering a figure she said the public needs to sit with.
“Eighty percent of the world’s blindness is avoidable. If we can just let that sink in, nobody has to be blind from glaucoma; and sight is probably our most precious sense. I say probably for the naysayers that think other senses are more important, but I truly believe that sight is the most precious sense,” Dr Bird, who has practised optometry since 1989.
Dr Bird noted that in an effort to reach men who would not come to her, she has taken her work to them — visiting gas stations and rum shops in the early morning hours to conduct eye pressure readings. What she has found at every stop is a wall of indifference she describes as the single greatest threat to men’s vision.
“The statistic is not saying that more men get glaucoma. The statistics are showing that more men lose sight from glaucoma just because of hesitancy to present for what I call a well-eye exam. They have photographs of me taking eye pressure at 7 o’clock in the morning in rum shops. I mean, the overall overriding sentiment from men is that ‘nothing do ma eye. Ma good. Ma good’,” the optometrist said.
She said that response — the absolute certainty that one’s eyes are fine simply because nothing feels wrong — is exactly what glaucoma is counting on. The disease, she explains, is engineered for silence.
“And I say to them, stick a pin right there. That is why glaucoma may take you down because glaucoma has no symptoms in the early stages. You always feel ‘ma good’. If you can say that you think I have glaucoma, it’s well advanced.
“There is no change really to your central vision, which is what we usually use. That’s Snellen chart. There’s very little, there’s no pain for most types of glaucoma. There’s one type that gives pain, but the type that affects us most here in the Eastern Caribbean and West Africa is called open angle glaucoma, where there is nothing to cause pain,” Dr Bird said.
She has been delivering this message for years and says that whilst medical technology has transformed much of what is possible in eye care, the fundamental nature of glaucoma has not changed one bit. That consistency, she said, makes public education the most powerful tool available.
Dr Bird and the Blind and Low Vision Task Force are urging the public — and men especially — to attend a free Eye Fair this Sunday, March 15th, at the Seventh-day Adventist School Grounds on Mary E. Pigott Drive from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Free screenings will be available as a first step toward protecting sight before it is gone.
Antigua and Barbuda marked World Glaucoma Day on March 12th alongside the rest of the global community.
