France 5 host Elisabeth Quin is at risk of losing her sight due to glaucoma. She confides in a book about the disease.
When you watch it on the small screen, nothing filters through, and yet. The host of France 5 Elisabeth Quin is indeed at risk of losing her sight due to glaucoma which has made her suffer for ten years. Very affected, she confides in her illness in her autobiographical book The night is risingwhich will be released on January 9th by Grasset editions.
Anguish
“Elisabeth Quin discovers that her eye is sick and that glaucoma alters, pollutes, clouds everything she looks at. She risks losing her sight. So begins the fight against anguish and illness, crumpled nights, fear of dawn, fragility of this eye suddenly auscultated, drenched in eye drops, dilated, examined, observed observer…”, can we read in the synopsis of the editor.
The 55-year-old host especially wants her testimony to make this disease known, to encourage as many people as possible to get tested. She also recounts the side effects of her treatment: “It’s fun to tell how in the morning you have to track down the hair on your face as if you were becoming the bearded woman. I took a certain pleasure in heckling the limits of what is supposedly avowable when you are a vaguely media person. It does not matter if you look at me strangely. I don’t care”.
A serious eye disease
Glaucoma is a serious vision disease which, by causing a slow destruction of the optic nerve, can cause total loss of sight. It is asymptomatic, the affected person feeling neither pain nor loss of visual acuity.
To overcome this injustice, the presenter of 28 minutes also saw writing as a real outlet. “It’s a way of putting disease at a distance, of understanding it better, of playing down the drama. I see this disease concretely, it’s in my eye, like an invading presence that obstructs my vision. From then on, writing, c “is a way of tearing out what is in my eyes and throwing it on the page. The approach is salutary”, she explains in an interview granted to She.
We can’t heal
Nearly one million individuals are affected by glaucoma in our country, of whom probably one in two are unaware of it. There is however a means of detection: the elevation of the pressure of the ocular liquid. The eye specialist has a simple, painless examination, which allows the diagnosis to be made very quickly. He puts a few drops of anesthetic in each eye, then applies to the cornea – which is the skin of our eyes – a small plastic prism which allows this pressure to be measured.
Since the precise causes of glaucoma are not known, it cannot be cured. On the other hand, it is possible to prevent it from progressing with drugs or local action by laser and surgery. Hence the importance of screening, which should be systematic after 40 years, especially in myopes.
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