I went blind after doing cartwheels — here's what I learned after losing my vision
Deborah Cobb was 19 years old when she broke out in a series of cartwheels — only to come up without her vision.
Now 42, Cobb has said that she has the ocular health of an 80-year-old and anticipates she will soon return to blindness due to early-onset macular degeneration.
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4 Seemingly harmless horseplay caused temporary blindness and chronic illness for one 19-year-old woman.
Mikhail Ulyannikov – stock.adobe.com
In a new interview with Newsweek, Cobb said she was with her friends when she decided to challenge herself to do as many cartwheels in a row as she could 'just for fun.'
'I started doing them and got to 13 and fell over super dizzy. My eyes were kind of spinning, so it took a moment to realize that my eyes weren't focusing,' she recalled.
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'Looking at her face, it was a giant orange blur,' Cobb continued, referring to a friend who witnessed the shocking moments. 'My eyes wouldn't fully focus. There was no pain, and my peripheral vision was fine, but everything I looked directly at was blocked by an orange blur.'
Cobb's harrowing story went viral in a recent post on Instagram, where she detailed the mysterious medical phenomenon that doctors first thought was a sign of leukemia and even AIDS.
'I had neither. Just weak blood vessels in my eyes that is apparently a genetic trait as I later learned,' she wrote of her condition, called macular degeneration.
4 Deborah Cobb, now 42, shared details of her macular degeneration diagnosis on Instagram.
deborahcobb_ihp/Instagram
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Cobb explained in the viral video post that her gymnastic stunts had caused internal hemorrhages in a part of her eye called the macula, an area at the center of the retina that is responsible for sharp, focused vision.
Macular degeneration is the leading cause of vision loss, affecting more than 200,000 Americans every year, usually brought on by old age and other factors, including genetics and cardiovascular disease. The condition causes blurred and distorted vision, dark spots changes in color perception.
She was deemed 'legally blind' for three months after the initial incident, and did not regain full vision for another three months thereafter.
4 Macular degeneration, usually only seen in the elderly, affects the eye's ability to bring sight into sharp focus.
mihai – stock.adobe.com
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Cobb's life came to a halt during that time. As a result of the injury, she was forced to quit massage school. She couldn't drive, watch TV or even look at herself in the mirror.
Though she was eventually able to return to school and later earned her license in massage therapy, she still lives in fear of losing her vision again.
'I can't do anything upside down or anything that causes too much blood to rush to my head. It happened once from doing push-ups, so I have to limit myself physically,' Cobb wrote.
4 Due to her eye condition, Cobb can no longer engage in physically exhaustive activities without risk of losing her vision again.
deborahcobb_ihp/Instagram
The experience inspired Cobb to dedicate her career to integrative medicine, and she now works with clients who suffer from anxiety and nervous system dysregulation.
Cobb has also said that losing her vision gave her a positive new outlook on life, saying she's so thankful for the lessons in empathy and 'to not take the simple things for granted.'
'I could live in fear because of it, or I could be filled with gratitude because of it,' Cobb concluded in the thoughtful post. 'I choose gratitude, because who wants to live in fear?!'
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