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SIX years ago next February Áine Mae O’Mahony lost her sight. Then aged 25, the Ennistymon woman operated Cascades Cafe in the town and was completely independent. However, type one diabetes contributed to her eventual loss of sight and a complete lifestyle change.
“Sometimes when you do get a knock, it takes you towards doing what you always wanted to do,” Áine Mae suggested. While she liked her work, it wasn’t her passion. She was particularly interested in working in radio and has had plenty of air-time experience since.
Still, in the immediate aftermath of her sight loss, Áine Mae was shocked.
“I knew I was having eyesight problems and I needed laser treatment because the blood vessel growth was strangling the eye. But the pressure went up on the eye after the laser. Any high pressure damages the optic nerve. Once the optic nerve is out, it’s lights out. You’re not going to see again. The eyes swelled up a couple of days after the laser. When the swelling went down and I opened my eyes, there wasn’t anything there, bar a bit of light detection,” she recalled vividly.
Áine Mae felt more concerned for her parents than she did for herself following her sight loss.
“It was harder seeing my family going through it, whereas I had accepted it. When you accept something, it’s like right ‘this is the way I am now. It mightn’t be for the rest of my life but I have to start getting on with things’. I think when your family see that level of independence they’re a bit more accepting about it,” she feels. Her father, Johnny, even offered his daughter his own eyes.
“I’ll take my chances on how mine look,” she laughed.
Áine Mae lived at home for a short period following her diagnosis but soon reasserted her independence.
“I felt that if I could show that I’m alright then they’ll be alright. That’s why I moved out, did courses and went back to what I knew. Living at home would have been very hard for me when I was out of home for so long,” she reasoned.
Having worked periodically in national and community radio, Áine Mae now has a six-month contract working with Senator Martin Conway. However, she has also donated months of her time fundraising for the Fighting Blindness organisation.
“What Fighting Blindness try to do is find cures. That’s their main purpose. They’ve got people working with them in labs in Trinity College, UCC and in many places throughout Ireland. The first thing that happens when you lose your sight is that you want to get it back. That’s how I got contact with them,” Áine Mae explained.
“I was trying to find out what’s out there for me and how could I get my sight back because, medically, I was told there was nothing else that could be done. So I was interested in finding out about stem cells or retinal implants. That’s what this group does so I was very passionate about what they believe in,” she added.
Some of her fundraising efforts have included jumping from an aeroplane at 10,000 feet, despite a fear of flying.
“I had a fear of flying at the time, which was funny. The jump knocked that on the head,” she recalled.
Since then Áine Mae has immersed herself in further fundraising projects closer to home.
“This summer I said we’d do something in Lahinch on a larger scale. So I decided to get in touch with Gerard Hartigan because he knew everybody who I should be getting in contact with,” she said, recalling a meeting in the Shamrock Hotel in Lahinch, which John McCarthy from the local surf school also attended.
“We all pooled together and asked what could we do to get the ball rolling and have a bit of community spirit involved? Gerard said he’d love to see Garland Sunday, which was always held on the last Sunday in July, being brought back. So we said grand and all the proceeds went to Fighting Blindness. I don’t know if Garland Sunday is going ahead next year but if it does we could put it towards the playground project just to keep the community vibe alive,” Áine Mae suggested.
Guided principally by Eamon Fitzgerald from the Claremont Hotel, Áine Mae set about trying to put together a fundraising CD entitled A Night in Lahinch.
“The CD idea was Eamon’s. Over two weeks, every night in the pub, there was recordings happening. It was very hard work. There were so many musicians who said they would love to be involved in it,” Áine Mae revealed, noting that the CD is still for sale in several outlets locally.
Again, all proceeds went to Fighting Blindness. Áine Mae believes 2019 could herald the development stage clinical trials for people with her sight-loss diagnosis. However, she is not pinning everything on that happening, although there is at least some hope.
“If it doesn’t happen for me so be it. It could happen for somebody else but I think it’s a fantastic idea. Everybody gets bad news every day of the week. In terms of sight loss or hearing loss, just to know there is something out there, there could be a breakthrough. I’d gladly put up my hand for a human trial if they were looking,” she said.
Although recognising that medical opinion suggests regaining her sight is an outside possibility, Áine Mae retains some optimism.
“You have to question people in society, especially now with everything that’s happening. People can make mistakes. People have been told that they can’t get this or that back and they have. I’d be a very spiritual person as well. With the power of belief, you’d never know what could happen,” she ventured.
If Áine Mae does regain her sight, she knows exactly what she will immediately do. “I’d probably just go for a jog down the beach without any assistance,” she smiled.
