Rory faces a 50% chance of losing his sight. However, we see a future where Rory’s sight loss can be reversed.
By leaving a gift in your Will to Sight Scotland, you can help make Rory’s future less uncertain by helping to fund groundbreaking research.
Rory’s dad, Phillip, was diagnosed with a genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa (RP) when he was just 24.
“At first, I started to struggle to see in the evening and in dimly lit places,” says Phillip. “And as time’s gone on, my peripheral vision has started to be affected too. “I just feel so incredibly frustrated by it all. I fear I’m going to become a huge burden on my family. And then there’s the guilt that lives with me every day. The guilt that keeps me up at night.
“Because when Lisa and I decided to have a baby, we knew there was a 50% chance of me passing on my faulty gene to the child. But we so desperately wanted to make our family complete.
“Now, it’s like we have a ticking bomb under us. RP is a silent and slow disease, and it won’t be until Rory is around 15 that an ophthalmologist will be able to tell if he has RP or not.
“And even if he doesn’t have RP, I face a future where I won’t be able to see him grow up. I won’t see him graduate. I won’t teach him to drive. I won’t have the relationship with my child that I so desperately want.”
Just talking about that possibility makes me feel sick. Could I have passed on this awful condition to my perfect little boy? Will he hate me for taking his sight away and devastating his life?
Through your generosity, we can fund groundbreaking research that will improve diagnoses, treatments and care for people with sight loss, and may even lead to cures for certain conditions like RP so children like Rory never have to face a life with sight loss.
It feels so incredibly unfair. I feel so despondent there are no treatments out there that can help. But that’s why the research funded by Sight Scotland is so important.
It does offer a flicker of hope. It does make me think that maybe my future, and Rory’s future, can be different.