Mara Faulkner's book, Going Blind; a Memoir, about her Father Going Blind from RP

    Recently I read a book by Mara Faulkner, called Going Blind; a Memoir.  Faulkner is a nun with retinitis pigmentosa who is facing the possibility of going blind along with her sisters who inherited RP as well and her nephews who have it as well.  I think she may have decided to be a nun, so as not to have children because the females always carry it and all of her sisters like her also have RP.  Her brother is the only one who does not, because it is heretogenically passed.  This means that fathers give it to daughters and daughters to sons.  Also, like me the girls have severe myopia and wear thick glasses from age five like me.  
     I do not have a sister by the same father.  My sisters have another father and therefore do not have the disease.  Part of me wishes I had a whole sister by my father and mother both who had the same myopia, RP and the genetic disposition to unavoidably carry RP like me.  Until I read this book I felt so ashamed of my disease.  I felt guilty for having it, for carrying it, for having bad eyesight.  I know that seems insane for someone who has not experienced it.  Ignorance and prejudice towards blind people is incredulous.  We are thought to be less than.  There are people who talk about blind people and not to them even in their presence.  We are whole people.  We are not children.  We are not challenged in any way at all except that we cannot see at all or we cannot see well enough to be sighted in a legal way, not enough to drive a vehicle for instance.
     My own eye disease RP is more misunderstood than most.  In Faulkner's book she describes her nephew who has retinitis pigmentosa.  He is an architect, even though his family was against it, like my father Lyn Ott who became a fine artist against some odds but with family support.  There is a drawing he did of Winston Churchill at the age of seventeen which is amazingly lifelike.
     She told about how her nephew would use his cane to get home from work on the bus at night, and how he would read the newspaper on the bus during the day making people think he was 'faking' which is ignorant.  I have had people misunderstand my ability to do one thing and not another with RP and I cannot even read a newspaper.  
     She talked much about the Irish famine and how an Irish girl brought the disease to her family which was intriguing because my grandmother also Midwestern said that it came from the Irish in our family as well.