After sixteen years of relative darkness, this legally blind woman saw her ‘best-friend’ guide dog for the very time in an emotional exchange, reducing her to tears.
After being diagnosed with bilateral optic neuritis – a degenerative visual impairment – two decades ago, Mary Sedgwick, 48, described the gradual decline of her sight as ‘like watching a movie that was slowly fading away’ – a sensation that caused her to plummet into a deep depression.
Waking up in complete darkness suddenly in 2004, the former physician from Asheville, North Carolina, USA, spent six solitary years secluding herself from the outside world, before finding ‘a meaning to life’ again, when she was matched up with her golden retriever guide-dog, Lucy.
Instantly hitting it off with one another, with her canine companion’s help, Mary began to enjoy life once again with an adjusted sense of freedom, but the question of what her loyal dog looked like always weighed heavy on her mind.
