I've been meaning to jot down a few thoughts along the lines of my experience of going blind for a little while. I still don't know exactly how I want to approach it. This is just a quick sketch, but here goes.
I had been a Field Service Engineer for a company that deals in copiers and business products for a number of years. That is a fancy way of saying that I fixed copy machines. I drove all over an 11 county area and did just about anything to just about any kind of machine that you use in an office and can plug into a wall outlet. From electric pencil sharpeners to typewriters and faxes all the way up to copiers as big as a desk. I was qualified to repair or even rebuild them from the frame up. Though I could also make circuit board repairs down to component level, we just sent them out to an outside agency for that. The rule of thumb was that if the part wasn't listed in the manual, it was at a level that we didn't concern ourselves with.
I had been having trouble with my eyesight for a while. I had cataract surgery on both my eyes before I was 30 years old. I wore glasses with trifocal lenses but had vision that was corrected to 20/20, at least in one eye, the other never quite recovered from that cataract surgery. I went to get a prescription for some safety glasses in 1994 or so and the Doctor at Lens Crafters referred me to see an Ophthomologist. Something about some wierd things happening in my eyes. Turns out that it was so wierd that it has never been documented in any medical books. I've been told that eye diseases and conditions have been documented since the ancient Egyptians, so that tells you how unusual my eye problems are. Not very comforting.
The prospects didn't look good. There is a history of blindness in my family from my mom's side. Nothing that any doctor has been able to connect as a hereditary thing, but even as a kid I wondered at the frequency of it. I figured I had a pretty fair chance of being blind some day. Now that day was here. I kept in close contact with eye doctors over the next few years. Things seemed stable for a long time. My vision declined a little bit but I was hoping it would stay in a range that allowed me to keep driving and keep working.
So, there I was in early 1997, driving along when my vision got really wierd. It was like something inside just erupted like a volcano going off. Now, I had been experiencing little "floaters" in my vision since my cataract surgeries, some eight or so years earlier. This was different. It really looked like a plume of lava shooting out of a volcano. It spread through my vision and in a short time I just couldn't see anything. What had happened was that a blood vessel had burst and what I saw was blood filling my eye.
I naturally pulled my car off the road, somehow got home and took some sick days and vacation days until it all cleared up. That shot down my plans to take a nice family vacation that summer., hitting the road in our conversion van and doing some sight seeing down the Atlantic coast.
I was able to return to work but was switched from doing repair work to managing the warehouse inventory. Different and still enjoyable. I still got to do equipment set ups and some deliveries. I finally got into contact with the Kellog Eye Center, located in Ann Arbor Michigan. I had a surgery lined up to help out my left eye. The one that hadn't quite recovered from cataract surgery. I figured it couldn't hurt. It was already blind and all I could see was light and dark. Then just 3 days before my birthday, and just a week before the scheduled surgery, it happened again. Driving home from work, my good eye hemmoraged and filled with blood. I parked my car for the last time and called for my wife to come and get me.
I phoned the Kellog Eye Center and was scheduled for a surgery at the soonest possible date. On the following Monday, all the aforementioned activity took place on a Friday, I phoned work and let them know where to find the company car and that I probably wouldn't be back in for a while.
In that surgery, I regained a degree of vision that took my bad eye from nearly total blindness to being just at the cuttoff of legal blindness, 20/200. It stayed there for the next year or more. They couldn't do much for the eye that had bled. Just let it clear up and when it settles down we could consider a similar surgery.
We scheduled a surgery but things didn't go well. My eye started bleeding during the procedure and couldn't be stopped. They sealed me back up and a followup procedure was planned. That one went better. Long story short. The second eye began to recover but suddenly nose dived. It hasn't had vision in it since.
I was in the National Guard after 8 years of active duty in the US Marines, I was up to a total of 17 years at this point. Because of my blindness, I was forced to leave military service, yet the Veterans Administration doesn't consider me to be a disabled vet, therefore no benefits. Naturally, I couldn't keep my job since it required a good degree of vision to both drive and to do the repairs. Even the warehouse job required vision to perform all the inventory duties. I checked with the Michigan rehab folks and found that the person in my area just retired and nobody could handle my case as far as getting support or benefits.
Wow, good thing I wasn't at such an emotional point where I was a basket case and contemplating something crazy, like suicide or something. If it weren't for my recent successful eye operation, I might have very well been at that point. As it was, I had just enough vision to do most things very well, yet just enough lack of vision to be frustrated at not seeing all those fine details.
Just my luck. I suddenly recieved a call from a brand new rehab teacher. Fresh out of school and new on the job. She came to the house and really got things done. I got on the rolls of SSDI quicker than normal. I got some good, positive feedback on adaptable techniques for getting around the house and neighborhood. I was scheduled for some classes down in Kalamazoo. Things were beginning to look like I might even be back in the job market soon. Not quite yet, but while my wife worked at her Wal-Mart job, my SSDI was enough to keep us out of danger of being homeless or destitute. My big concern from the whole ordeal was keeping our current level of living standard with my 4 boys, who ranged in ages from 6 to 12 years old at that time. My biggest fear was that I would be caught in a middle ground. Eyesight not good enough to hold a job, but not bad enough for social security to kick in some monetary funding.
Around January of 1998 it was pretty much plain that my right eye was gone. My rehab teacher brought me a Braille book and for the next three months while awaiting going to Kalamazoo for training, I taught myself all the Grade 1 Braille symbols. I had just finished it the same week as my school was to start.
Let me take a quick side trip here. It is funny how people can suddenly change when you do something outrageous like losing your eyesight. People that I had known for years somehow treat you like they just met you. Like everything you have experienced over the years happened to a different person. You also get to hear all those myths about blindness that people have heard about. For example, barely a week had gone by after my first eye sergery that was a success when a person asked me, "So, you can read Braille now?" Um, no. It isn't a thing that just automatically comes to you when you go blind. Ready? close your eyes. Wow, now you can read Braille to! Amazing how that works, isn't it? Can you feel the sarcasm in those words? Good, it was intended.
You also get the people who comment to you on the sudden super hearing that you should be getting any day now. You know, to compensate for the sense of sight that was lost, all the other senses should be kicking into high gear any moment now. The truth is that other sense pretty much stay the same. The most that I can say about it is that my hearing probably has actually declined just a little. It goes along with the expanding middle, thinning hair and general aging.
I did notice a small increase in awareness when it comes to sounds. You can do this experiment too. Just tune the TV into a favorite program. In my case I was watching a cop show where they were pursuing some bad guys out in the woods. Every few seconds you could hear the sound of a bird chirp in between dialog. The sound of an occasional horse and wind rustling the leaves on the trees. Now close your eyes and just listen. All those background sounds suddenly take on a bigger part than they did while you were busily engaged in watching your favorite TV stars. That bird isn't an occasional interjection, it is a continuous loop. Man, it sounds so cheap and artificial. That horse is the same way, and those leaves too. Quick, open your eyes. Hey all the background noise is back to intermittant and sounds more natural amid the voices of the actors. Close your eyes. Nope, still looping those artificial sounding affects. Go ahead, try it. That is the extent of the brand new super hearing that I noticed as a new blind person.
I mentioned earlier that it was a good thing that going blind didn't cause me to go into a state of being a basket case or have thoughts of suicide. It really can and does happen to people. It could have happened to me. My mom is blind and so is two of my uncles and my grandma, and the list goes on to previous generations. I sort of have a built in support group. That is one thing that is important for any blind person. To know that there are others out there going through the same thing that you are. Having the same thoughts, gripes and concerns as you. When my one uncle lost his vision, he locked himself in his bedroom and refused to ever come out. He didn't see any reason for him to ever live a normal life. His older brother who was blind, went and gave him a long talk and let him know that being blind isn't fatal, and that life goes on and it is all in how you deal with it. Just a few years later, my mom became blind. What do you think that she did? She had 4 kids to raise. Her mom and two brothers were blind. She had witnessed the dramatic event that got her baby brother out of his room and back into life. She did the same thing.
Crazy, isn't it. She refused to come out of her room. When her rehab teacher came by, she refused to learn Braille. She refused to use a cane. Those were all things that blind people did. She wasn't blind and if she did those things it would be marking her as a blind person. Hmm... can you say denial?
In my case, I was spared much of all that. The big thing for me was I still had a lot of usable vision. At 20/200, I felt like I was cheating. I was far from being totally blind, but I knew that it would never get any better. Only worse. I had to provide for a family with 4 young boys. I had no job, or means of support so I stayed focused on regaining a place in the job market. I knew it would take some time and I wanted to hone my adaptability skills as best as I could so I could compete in what ever field I could get into. I began looking at jobs from the aspect of how I could do that with little or no vision. I managed to keep a pretty positive outlook on life in general.
After a year of rehab and being Mr. Mom at home, I finally found a job. I was lucky. It didn't pay a lot, it was just under the limit of allowable wage by SSDI. That is not a bad thing. It literally doubled what I had been earning and would take a job that paid twice that to make it worth my while in pursuing a more advanced career. I was happy just doing that job because I had money in my wallet again. I was willing to keep doing it and perfecting my skills. I wanted to build a good track record so when I wanted to look for work that paid twice that amount, I could have all the qualifications a potential employer was looking for. Good plan. However, life doesn't always comply. The company I worked for was bought out by a bigger one, which was bought out by a bigger one, which figured it was time for cutbacks in expenses. Two words. Massive Layoff.
I looked around for similar jobs at similar companies. I found out how lucky I had been before. People only saw the cane. It didn't matter that I had a ten year track record in technology related fields. It didn't matter that I had been doing the same job as my sighted counterparts and only slightly behind performance standards. Hey, you try to keep up in a busy helpdesk environment without the aid of all the scripts and written reference material that everybody else uses. Do it all from your memory and see if you aren't slightly behind performance standards.
People just couldn't figure how they could function without all the information that comes your way in print media. They only saw the same in me. The fact that I was beyond that and doing a good job was up in smoke.
For years I had heard of blind venders. You see them almost as a stereotype in movies or on TV shows. Pushing candy and snacks over a counter, or newspapers and magazines on a street corner or lobby. Some people, even blind people see it only as a stereotype and don't want any part of it. It is seen as a subsidized hand out, something to keep a disabled guy busy. In reality it can be quite a lucrative business, just like any business it depends a lot on location. I know it is a real business because I sure pay a lot out in taxes. Everything from sales tax to labor tax and personal income tax.
I have been doing vending ever since that big layoff. It took about a year or so to get through all that training, and there is never any guarantee that a facility will be available once you get through, but it is worth doing.
My other option, if vending didn't work out, was to go back to school. Who knows, I still might. My computer skills are above those of the average bear, but I have a way to go to get a good job doing something like being a network specialist, programmer, information technology expert or the like. So, I would probably pursue a technology degree or one also in business, or both. I figure that way I have the bases covered. Someone can hire me to be their computer guru, but if not I'll just start my own business and do my own thing.
As you can see from all this, blindness isn't the end of things, it is more like just a different path, a different lifestyle. It is something that can be dealt with by the blind person. The real challenge is all the rest of the world who isn't willing to give you a chance. That is why blind people need to stick together. That is why there is blindness advocacy groups and agencies. Though it feels like it, you are not alone, there are others who are going through the same thing. The same emotions, the same struggles, the same frustrations. Find and talk to other blind people. Try to educate the nonblind people who might stand in your way.