| LEARNING TO LIVE WITH A DAMNED NUISANCE
Filled with grace and good humor, My Friend, You Are Legally Blind is a brief foray into the author's lifelong love affair with books and how AMD has provided a detour but not a permanent roadblock in his continuing journey as a writer.Champlin is addressing others who have had to make similar adjustments in their lives because of macular degeneration and concludes his book with a list of helpful resources.
--Publishers Weekly, 6/11/01
According to Charles Champlin, blindness is a tragedy. Partial blindness, he adds, is a "damned nuisance."
Charles Champlin has age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a degenerative disease that causes partial and progressive blindness. He is not alone. There are an estimated ten million Americans with AMD, and this number is growing at the rate of about two hundred thousand a year.
One reason for the rising incidence of AMD is the very fact that it is age-related. There are more older people now than ever before. Beyond that statistic, it's impossible to explain the growth rate of the disease, because at this point we have no clear idea of what causes AMD to begin with. Even more frustrating is the fact that there is no known cure for the disease. The best ophthalmology can do at this point is to slow down the progress of the disease, to (in the words of Champlin's doctor) keep the rock from rolling downhill into the dark.
In the two years since Champlin's AMD was diagnosed, he has had to adjust to partial blindness. Of course he has given up driving; he has also stopped buttering his own bread, and he has difficulty parting his hair in the morning or finding a favorite book on the shelf. One of the greatest problems for people with AMD is the danger of depression that comes with losing one's independence.
But coping has been a major theme in Champlin's life since the onset of AMD, and that is what his book is about. He has learned of the tools and resources that help the partially blind. He has come to enjoy hearing in a new way, whether it be books on tape, listening to music, or recognizing the voices of friends in social situations. Charles Champlin has learned why partial blindness is also called partial-sightedness.
My Friend, You Are Legally Blind is a candid account of one man's battle with AMD. Some of it is practical, and some of it is philosophical. None of it whines, and much of it is entertaining. Full of advice for fellow suffers of AMD and their caregivers, the book also contains a reference section.
About the Author. Charles Champlin was a writer-correspondent for Time and Life magazines from 1948-1965, Arts Editor for the Los Angeles Times from 1965-1991, and the principal film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 1967-1980. He is the author of Back There Where the Past Was: A Memoir (Syracuse University Press), George Lucas: The Creative Impulse(Abrams), and Hollywood's Revolutionary Decade (John Daniel & Co.). He lives and writes in Los Angeles, California.
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