The lifelong sentence

Speech by MDS President Sharon Siddique at the launch of the 2009 AMD Awareness Week.

Guest of Honour, Mr Heng Chee How, Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office, Distinguished Guests, Friends,

MDS Singapore has around 100 members. One of our major milestones this year, as you have just heard, has been to join AMDAI – The AMD Alliance International. We also maintain an active website, and a blog, and organize around 10 events per year for our members.

I would like to spend the next few minutes getting personal. Being diagnosed with MD is a life-altering experience. It is physically painless, but emotionally devastating.

How do you describe it? During your waking hours you cannot forget that you have MD. It literally obscures your vision. The best way to have a normally sighted person empathize is to smear a dot (small or large) of Vaseline onto a pair of spectacles. You can see around it, but you can’t see through it. That is why people describe seeing with AMD as “I can see the stars, but not the moon”, or “I looked in the mirror, but I wasn’t there”. Magnification is useful for reading because increasing the size of the letters, decreases the relative size of your blindspot. At best it is annoying, at worst it is completely debilitating.

So suddenly our most important health care professionals become our ophthalmologists, and our optometrists. We take comfort in the fact that medical science is making great strides in new ways to patch us up, retard our vision loss, and we are all waiting for breakthrough cures.

But we also all know that MD is presently a lifelong sentence. So a patient-support group like ours is a life-support, an information disseminator, and a social network. We come from all religions, ethnic groups, and walks of life. MD does not discriminate.

While we are not fatalistic, we are realistic. We support an holistic approach to health. It is within our power to manage the risk factors as efficiently and diligently as possible. While we all recognize this in theory, how does one put this into practice?

We seek to keep our MDS programmes lively and informative. This afternoon at 2pm in this auditorium we will be having a talk on “Nutrition for AMD Eyes” by Dr Kumari Neelam, of AH Hospital. She has also organized a cooking demonstration for us. Most AMD diet tips are Western-based. We need to do more to translate good dietary habits into Asian cuisine. Come and join us if you can. You can become a member of MDS at the door, and our annual membership fee is only $10.

It now just remains for me to say a few words of thanks.

• To all the doctors and health care practitioners, who like Dr Kumari, have given of their very valuable Saturday afternoons to interact with us over the years. We are so grateful.

• I would also like to acknowledge our huge debt to AH for its generous support. This includes the use of AH facilities for our meetings. And most importantly, the AH staffers who have touched our lives through their concern, support, and many kindnesses.

• Here I would like to single out Prof Au Eong Kah Guan, our MDS advisor, without whom this patient support group would not have been formed.

• Prof Ajeet Wagle, who has so kindly included us in AH eye care activities. And most especially Alice HOW, who always finds answers to our questions and solutions to our problems. Last but certainly not least, I would like to acknowledge Mr Oon, who has always made himself available on Saturday afternoons to assist us with AV technical’s during our meetings. Thank you.

If given a choice, no one wants to become an AMD sufferer. But we are fortunate to have such an impressive support system, and AMD Week is an example of how our health care system works. We are indeed lucky to be living in Singapore.

Thank you.