When you get my age, you tend to use your computer to help with things like genealogical searches and looking up health problems.

A couple of years ago, my right eye went goofy on me. I thought I just needed a prescription change since it had been several years. Bad news. The doc had me look at an Ambler Grid. There is a black dot in the center of a grid of lines. When I tried to see the black dot, the lines were really wavy. I had noticed that when I used the right eye to look at power lines, they galloped along as if one was going to touch the other. I knew I had a problem. The doc called it senile macular degeneration. I objected to being diagnosed as senile. Don’t know if it was my objection, but they changed the description to Age-Related Macular Degeneration, or ARMD.

There are two kinds of ARMD. Wet and dry. Wet can be treated by laser surgery, because it is caused by leaking blood vessels that can be zapped, but I have the dry version that supposedly has no medical/doctor solution. Unless you have a computer.

I had heard that spinach improved ARMD. So I typed ARMD in the search box on the Net and the first two sites were summaries of Dr. Stuart Richer’s clinical tests of spinach. This was just after he released his paper. If you type that in now, you won’t get his paper without searching for Richer. I wanted to know how much did I have to eat and did it work. He gave 14 patients with dry ARMD five ounces of sautéed spinach four to seven times a week. Improvement was noticed within three months.

I started eating canned spinach. Couldn’t buy fresh locally. Another article said it was more effective with some fat, so I added a dollop of olive oil to each serving. By the end of two months, I was seeing better. Now after nine months, it hasn’t completely cleared up, but I can read print with that eye, which I couldn’t do before.

My only problem is that I eat out a lot, and restaurants rarely have spinach on the menu. I am starting a campaign for all of us senile oldtimers to get every cafe to cater to us by serving spinach with every meal.

If you have a campaign, you can send me E-mail at crodenberg@aol.com.