My friend and I are scheduled to leave on Thursday at 9:00 for a flight which will take us to Minneapolis and then to Kansas City for the FFB (Foundation for Fighting Blindness) convention. The day before, I get a call from the airline, a recorded message, saying our flight had been cancelled and we were rescheduled on a flight early Friday morning. I called my friend, who is also sight impaired, to see if she wanted to take the Friday flight but we would just barely make the first session. We decided to call the airline to see if there was another flight on Thursday we could take because we really want to get there before the convention starts.

I call and the guy I talk to says he has an earlier flight at 6:40 on Thursday we could take so I grab it even though it meant getting up at four a.m.

We make our flight, get to Minneapolis and get on a flight to KC. About 20 minutes before we are about to land, I take out my conference booklet and the woman sitting next to me asks if I have RP. I say I do and so does my friend. She says she does too and is in a clinical trial where she received an implant in one eye (and sutures in the other so she does not know which eye has the implant). She goes on to say that earlier studies have shown the implants have stopped the progression of the disease and in a SMALL number of cases, vision has improved.

I ask if this is proven successful, when could the rest of us receive this implant and she says it COULD be as early as 2009!!!!

I almost started to cry. For the past 13 years I have been going to these conferences and hearing about the animal studies and to now be in the human trials is a HUGE step forward. We will have to wait and see how these studies go, obviously, but at least it is hope and gives us something to hold on to.

I never would have met her had we been on our original flight because she went to different sessions than I did (Since I have the Ushers form of RP, I went to all the Usher sessions). So, a cancelled flight is not always a bad thing.