Molly Burke

speaker

1,048 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 21 Dec

Molly Burke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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The Checkup with Doctor Mike · She Doesn't Want To Cure Her Blindness | Molly Burke · 12 Oct 2025 podcast

And in that time, in my central vision, I lost color.

So all dark colors just looked black, all light colors just looked white.

So I could only see extreme high contrast.

I went from needing like larger and larger and larger print to eventually not being able to see print at all.

And then I also have something called Charles Bonnet syndrome, which is the only disease that we currently know of that causes visual hallucinations that is not related to mental illness.

So people with Charles Bonnet syndrome experience visual hallucinations that can range from seeing hyper-realistic things

like walking into your living room and seeing an old timey horse and carriage sitting there, to seeing kaleidoscope of colors and light.

In my case, it's blue, green, and purple fireworks that fill the entirety of my visual field.

I see them 24 seven.

They never go away.

Eyes open, eyes closed, going to sleep.

It is constantly neon bright lights.

And essentially what happens is it's common for people who have vision loss that happens rapidly and traditionally due to retinal diseases like mine.

And your brain panics and it wants to see.

And so it tries to rewire itself to see and it creates new visual pathways.

And so it's very...

Very few people know about it.

And it's really important to raise awareness about it because not only do a lot of people living with retinal diseases start experiencing it and not say anything out of fear of the stigma that comes with seeing things that aren't there, but also a lot of elderly people are misdiagnosed with things like dementia because they're actually just experiencing Charles Bonnet syndrome related to something like macular degeneration.

Yeah, my classmates at school all turned on me.

And then also what was most shocking was the adults in my life.

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