Janice Burton, 60, Stoke on Trent
Crouching down in front of me, my mum Mary, then 31, took my face in her hands. ‘Look at me, sweetheart,’ she soothed.
‘I am,’ I said.
Only, my right eye wasn’t focusing, kept blurring and giving me double vision.
Back and forth to doctors, nobody could diagnose me.
But when I was just 8, the eyesight in my right eye had gone.
Finally, the following year, we got a diagnosis.
‘It’s Coats’ disease,’ a doctor told us.
An incredibly rare condition affecting the blood vessels at the back of the eye.
I was told I was one of only two female sufferers in the world, that there’s no known cause and it’s incurable.
In 1976, I was devastated when my left eye started…
