We realize there are challenges to living with AMD. We also realize you don't want to have to rely on your loved ones for help. And you may not have to. Read the article below to learn how one inspiring woman managed to maintain her independence and continues to live a full life with AMD.

The following is an excerpt from an article on the Macular Degeneration Partnership Web site, AMD.org. The full article can be found at
http://www.amd.org/site/PageServer?
pagename=Generation_Elaine_Dundy.

L.A. Author Finds Hope—Continues Writing Career
Kate Kitchen

Of all her fascinating, well-deserved credentials printed on the book cover of her autobiography, Life Itself, I found these three items particularly intriguing. "[Elaine Dundy] ...drank Papa Dobles with Hemingway in Havana, shared a psychiatrist with Tennessee Williams, married the enfant terrible of British theatre critics, Kenneth Tynan." She's feisty and funny and has a hearty laugh that makes you think you're talking to a 30-year-old woman.

What a life this lady has lived—is living. And even with the onset several years ago of age-related macular degeneration, she has no intention of stopping.

New York born Elaine Brinberg was raised on Park Avenue. Her father Samuel was in the "rag trade," (the clothing industry), making career adjustments every few years to cope with the Great Depression, then World War II. Elaine's mother Florence tried as best she could to protect Elaine, a middle child, and her two sisters from the wrath of her husband who was by all accounts, "a bully, a frightening person to be around." It was in school where she learned to become independent—so independent, in fact, that after she graduated from high school, she moved 3,000 miles away.

The onset of AMD

Life was great, always an adventure. And then in 2000, life threw her a curveball. "I started having vision problems," she explained. "It was becoming more and more difficult to read—not to see, necessarily, but to read." Since reading is her life, Elaine visited ophthalmologists, changing eye glasses every six months, changing doctors equally as frequently, unable to find one who could help her. She had AMD. She visited low vision centers and institutes for the blind, only to be frustrated with the helpless suggestions: "Play dominos with large pieces, play cards with large faces. Eat lots of spinach, and get a talking clock!"

"I didn't want those things; I didn't want a talking clock," she insisted. "All I wanted to be able to do was to read and write!"

"It started to kick in more rapidly, then," she said. "Newspapers were becoming impossible to read; it was harder to use my computer to write. The only thing I didn't miss that I had to stop was driving. People drive crazy out here," she said.

Even among her new challenges, she found beauty. She now looked at landscapes differently and with her permission, this is a quote from an article she recently wrote for the London Guardian: "With age-dimming eyes, Matisse, Monet and Degas painted great canvases. Like a fighting bull I can see red. I can see rainbows."

Her biggest complaint is losing things. "I spend more time trying to find things. I draw big flowers and stars and different things on my files, etc. But I spend more time looking for things I've misplaced than I do working. It's so frustrating," she said.

Knowing there is not yet a cure for AMD, she is determined to cope. The upside is that as she discovers assistive technology, she is adapting it into her lifestyle. "And I do use big cards with large print, now," she says. "It's easier to shuffle things around and change the order of things if I use cards."

To read Elaine's full story on AMD.org, click here.