Erik Weihenmayer

  b. 1968 | American mountain climber

At The Bottom

— 1981

Doctors were powerless to stop the slow progress of the disease.

Erik Weihenmayer would not be able to look forward to the same sorts of teenage experiences his friends would enjoy.  Diagnosed with a rare eye disease called retinoschisis ten years earlier, the 13-year-old Weihenmayer was losing his last remaining bit of sight as his retinas slowly split. Doctors were powerless to stop the slow progress of the disease. “Each morning,” he wrote in his memoir,” I woke up to a new level of diminished vision and the lessened expectations that went with it.”  His world was shrinking each day, but he had no idea when his retinas would finally give way to the pressure building up behind them.  The world he saw was filled with “dim, dark shapes” that hovered on the periphery of his vision.  “Nothing I saw was real and, as my vision flickered, I imagined monsters with scaly bodies and bulging eyes waiting just out of view.” By the time he turned 14, his vision was completely gone.