Living with Stargardt disease: ‘It starts with central vision loss... then I was told I would go blind. It’s downright awful’

When Tony award-winning producer and psychologist Paul Boskind learned that he had Stargardt disease, a condition that causes progressive deterioration of a person’s eyesight, he knew he had to allow himself to grieve

Paul Boskind: ‘Don’t accept the prognosis hook, line and sinker’

Liadán Hynes

‘I was informed at the age of 21 that I was going to go blind,” Paul Boskind says. Then a student, Paul, an American who spends part of his time in his Irish home, Clonbrock Castle in Galway, had noticed he was struggling to read the phone book, and that in class, during lab time, he was having difficulty. “In microbiology lab, when I was an undergrad, everyone was seeing what they’re supposed to with their microscope, and I was like, ‘I don’t see it’,” he recalls now. “I wasn’t seeing what everybody else in the lab was seeing. I went to an ophthalmologist knowing that something was not right with my ability to see.”

He ended up at a consultation at the University of Texas health Science Centre in San Antonio, being assessed at a meeting of eye specialists who had gathered to figure out some cases that are not clear cut.