VisionWalk is not Just Blind Hope

Bonnie Libby sees lots of reasons to walk, and the walk she’ll take this weekend, the Fifth Annual Bay Area 5K VisionWalk, is one of hope—for research that could lead to preventions, treatments and cures for blinding diseases such as Usher syndrome, which affects her daughter, Allison.

“It’s heartbreaking to watch someone you love suffer from a disease robbing them of their vision,” Libby says.

Libby—who lives in Cupertino and is an early-intervention specialist at —says Allison was 13 when she found out she had a blinding disease. It took a couple of misdiagnoses for doctors to finally settle on Usher syndrome, an inherited condition that's characterized by progressive vision and hearing loss and may also affect balance.

Allison, who graduated from , is now working on her graduate degree in clinical psychology at Stanford.

“She’s certainly not letting (Usher syndrome hold) her back,” Bonnie says.

Now 26, Allison commutes from San Francisco, where she lives and works, to Palo Alto for school. When she was 24, for the safety of herself and others, she decided to stop driving, though “she still has a lot of vision,” her mother says.

“We’re hoping we can preserve that vision. She has donut holes, and her peripheral is affected, and she doesn’t see down very well.”

The money Bonnie Libby and her “Eyes on the Future” team raises in Saturday's walk, which at last count was more than $33,000, will go to support the Foundation Fighting Blindness and its research work on Usher syndrome and other retinal degenerative diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa, macular degeneration, Stargardt disease and numerous others.

“Fortunately, the Foundation Fighting Blindness is funding many avenues of leading-edge research and has already restored vision in a breakthrough gene-therapy clinical trial that shows promise for treating several retinal diseases. VisionWalk is an important event that will move us one step closer to a cure.”

"Because of all the research, we’re really, really hopeful," Libby says.

The event will be Saturday at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Donations may still be made to Libby’s team or to VisionWalk by clicking here.