Olympic gold medalist opens up on eye disease
Olympic gold medalist opens up on eye disease
An Olympic gold medalist from Atlanta says she wants people who are having eye problems to find out more about thyroid eye disease. It's an illness Gail Devers has struggled with for years without even know what it was or what it was called. Here's why it's important not to wait to get it checked out.
AtLANTA - Three-time Olympic Gold Medalist Gail Devers often says her biggest opponent wasn’t any of the racers on the track, but a hidden disease she struggled with.
FOX 5 caught up with Devers as she was helping her daughter Karsen do a summer sprinting workout to prepare to compete at the University of Georgia in the fall.
As a three-time Olympic gold medalist in the 100-meter race, Devers knows a thing or two about running. But a hidden illness almost stole her Olympic dreams.
"I got sick and didn’t know if I was going to continue…and I’d lost so much weight. And my eyes, they were bulging and they were red and they hurt. And I was tired all the time, yet I couldn’t sleep," Devers said.
The symptoms really started to affect her in 1988, after she had won the 100 meters at the 1987 Pan American Games.
"I set an American record in the hurdles and then shortly after that, I couldn’t finish the race. And I was running slower times than I ran in high school and I had to sit out," Devers said.
After going from doctor to doctor for two and a half years, she was finally diagnosed with Graves’ disease in 1990.
"It was a dream come true because it let me know that I wasn’t crazy, that there was truly something wrong with me, that I could whip out my sticky notes again that had my goals and my dreams on it and get back to work," Devers said.
She got back to work on her dreams of winning Olympic Gold, which she did in Barcelona, Spain in 1992.
"I actually hear it like it’s yesterday, he says "and champion del Mundo, from the USA, Gail Devers!" And, you know, truly that is joy. And I think for me it was more because of all that I had gone through," Devers said.
She had overcome her disease to do the impossible.
But her race against it wasn’t finished yet.
"[I was] still having problems with my eyes though and I’m trying to figure out why. You know, they’re still bulging. They’re red. There’s issues all the time," Devers said.
She says for 30 years she just tried to live with it.
Devers explained that she ran hurdles by counting the steps and feeling the rhythm even when she couldn’t see them properly.
She also says she couldn’t drive at night with her eye problems.
Then she finally sought help again and discovered the truth about Thyroid Eye Disease (TED).
"Up to 50% of people with Graves’ disease may develop TED. And with all the doctors that I had gone to, not a single doctor told me that my Graves’ disease and my TED were separate. They’re related, but they’re separate. And they have to be treated by a separate, like an oculoplastic surgeon or a neuro ophthalmologist," Devers said.
Finally, she was able to get the specialized treatment needed to get TED under control.
Now she works to spread the word about TED, so others don’t suffer in silence.
"My health mission is to educate other people and to make it so that you don’t have to deal with what I’ve gone through—30 years of having to live with something that you didn’t have a name to or you didn’t know what was going on," she said.
Devers encourages people to check out https://www.thyroideyes.com/ to learn about TED and to find a specialist for diagnosis and treatment if you believe you or someone you know may have it.