Roseanne Barr Thought She Was Going Blind for a Whole Year — But It Was a Misdiagnosis

The 65-year-old actress was mistakenly told she was going blind two years ago

After a whole year of thinking she was going blind due to macular degeneration and glaucoma, Roseanne Barr received some good news: She was no longer losing her eyesight, and it was a misdiagnosis all along.

“I went to a new doctor about a year ago,” Barr tells PEOPLE exclusively in this week’s issue, on stands Friday. “She told me I don’t have macular degeneration, but rather a mole on the inside of my eye that’s growing, and that’s why my vision is narrowing. Probably in the next year or so I can get it removed. I have a bad eye, but I’m not losing my eyesight.”

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“My dad has macular degeneration so I thought it was genetic,” she adds. “I just accepted it. It was a way better diagnosis than some of my friends were getting. It’s not deadly. I didn’t take it too badly.”

In 2015, the 65-year-old actress was given the news of her deteriorating eyesightand immediately took to her own treatment plan.

“I have macular degeneration and glaucoma, so [marijuana] is good for me for that because I have pressure in my eyes. It’s a good medicine for a lot of things,” Barr previously told the Daily Beast.

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RELATED VIDEO: How ‘Roseanne’ Went from a Reunion to a Revival!

While Barr admits that she was scared at first, she eventually learned to accept the health scare.

“I’m positive that nothing will go right in life,” she says. “That lets me off the hook. You never know. It’s never what you think and it’s never what you dread – it’s always something else that you didn’t expect. So you might as well live every day and have as much fun as you can. Do at least one good deed a day anonymously. Have as much fun as you can have.”

Now, Barr, who spends a lot of her free time babysitting her grandkids and working on her macadamia nut farm in Hawaii, just finished wrapping the revival of Roseanne as a limited ABC series.

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Ryan Pfluger

“The first day in the writers room, I thought I was in heaven,” she says. “Every idea I had all this time, I had pitched to them and they picked them right up. It was kind of like a machine – it worked so well. The first day on the set, I hadn’t seen John (Goodman) or Laurie (Metcalfe) for a long time, and there we were. It was really exciting to watch them rebuild the set — it’s just perfect. It still felt new, but very familiar.”

The Roseanne revival premieres Tuesday on at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.

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