Coronation Street's Lisa George's blindness fears
'Coronation Street's Lisa George fears she is going blind after a shock diagnosis.
The actress - who has played Beth Sutherland on the ITV soap for the past 12 years - revealed she's been diagnosed with the condition NAION - non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy - which causes sudden vision loss in one eye.
Lisa first suffered an eye injury when a piece of rope hit her eye while gardening, leading to her permanently losing part of the sight at the bottom of her right eye.
She told MailOnline: "'Corrie' were great, they printed my scripts in a bigger font to make it easier but I just wasn't getting any explanation as to what had happened. I had scans, dye put into my eyeball, but the doctors were split as to whether it was the trauma from the rope or something else that had caused the haemorrhage at the back of my eye."
And, a few years later she began to have trouble with her left eye.
She said: "I had a CT scan on my head, two lumber punctures, and they wouldn't let me take my medication for my Diabetes which was making feel really poorly.
"No-one seemed to have a clue what had happened, they just said 'you've got nerve clusters' and after a week they sent me home and told me to take Aspirin for the pain.
"Fortunately I was able to go private but there are so many people out there who are still not getting answers. Eventually I ended up at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and was seen by a neuro ophthalmologist."
And, Lisa fears she will never do stage work again.
She said: "I thought 'I don't think I'm ever going to be able to work on the stage again' because there's no way I'd be able to see if I had to come off the stage in the dark.
"The panic and fear set in and I got really upset. Obviously, I'm sure they put things in place for visually impaired actors but it was a real fear and it really hit me real hard, how am I going to cope in the industry in the future?"