A lot of you may not be aware of this but my father is
visually-impaired, as in blind. My father was born fully sighted and enjoyed
quite a rich, entertaining and rewarding work experience. However, he
contracted diabetes and through that glaucoma, which started robbing him of his
eyesight. In March 2007, just a few days after his 59th birthday,
glaucoma stole away his remaining vision, rendering him legally and totally
blind.
Although I have two younger sisters, they both live abroad
and have their own family/professional lives well underway. Remaining here in
T&T were my mother and me (at the time I was still living in South
Oropouche). What I want to share with you are the adjustments that my parents
and I had to make in coping with my father’s new disability.
I think the most major adjustment was the one that my father
had to make to his lifestyle and living situation. A disability is not an easy
imposition to just accept in your life, especially if it is one that suddenly
manifests in the victim’s life. And in my father’s case, he lost one of his
five essential senses – sight.
If you feel that is no big thing, I challenge any of you to
go just three hours of your life with your eyes completely shut (no peeking!)
and see how you manage to get by your daily routine. That is what my father had
to cope with, in a hurry as well. Through this I learned that sight plays a
very important part in maintaining our upright balance. Although much of that
function is handled by the inner ear, sight allows us to gauge our relationship
in space with other objects, telling us visually when we are drifting/leaning
too much in any one direction and allowing us to make corrections accordingly.
Ask any blind person and they will tell you that one thing they dislike is
having to stand up for prolonged periods without something to lean on or
against. You may find that they appear to be fidgeting or drifting because they
don’t have the sight correction ability to remain ‘in place’.
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| Life is complicated enough as it is with five senses available. How would you function with only four? |
For those of you who like to think that life is like comic
books, blind people are
NOT like Matt
Murdock aka Daredevil. Losing your sight does not heighten your remaining
senses to superhuman levels. What it does do, though, is coerce you into using
and relying on the four remaining senses to a larger extent, particularly your
sense of hearing. The importance of some of these senses is often taken for
granted when you can literally see around you. Most blind people get to know persons
they interact with by voice recognition and even scent recognition. And extremes
of noise or quiet can cause them to become disoriented too.
So let’s talk about those adjustments I mentioned earlier.
When dealing with the visually impaired, it is sometimes very easy to make
errors that aren’t immediately evident because you still have your sight. Most blind persons become creatures of
routine in that they map out their living spaces in a manner that is easy for
them to remember and navigate. Through this memorisation of their space, they
learn to manoeuvre in it accordingly, sometimes to the point where any little
deviation from that routine presents them with a genuine challenge.
For my mother, who likes to rearrange furniture to her
liking with regularity, this put an end to some of her decorative efforts. For
my father to get around the house, it became critical that positions of
furniture become fixed so that he could learn where they were. Several barked
shins, stubbed toes and rapped knuckles later, he could move freely about so
that his own house did not become a complete mystery to him.
It also meant that we sighted ones had to be a bit more
circumspect in where we placed items, even if temporarily. That basket of
clothes you left at the top of the stair just to run and answer the phone? That
could be a trap causing my father, who can’t see that it is there, to have a
headlong fall after tripping over it. Put that sharp knife on the corner of the
counter? My father could pass his hand along it and give himself a nasty gash
.
For some blind persons, they prefer to meet/have most doors
they encountered in a closed position. The reason for this is that the closed
door allows them to situate themselves when moving from space to space and that
it is difficult for them to know in advance if the door is slightly, partially
or fully open. I was guilty of this once, and it caused by father a small cut
just above his eyebrow.
The door to my parents’ bedroom is about five feet from my
father’s bedside and opens inwards. I
had left the door ajar to go and do something else, forgetting it that way.
When my mother summoned my father for lunch, he arose from the bed in his
accustomed fashion, only to headbutt the open door! The sound made my mother
and me run to the scene and the blow gave my father an instant headache to go
along with the cut to his eyebrow.
Because my father’s loss of sight was diabetes-related and
he also suffered from hypertension, some major dietary changes had to take
place for him and (to the chagrin of my taste buds) for us. You’d be very
surprised how sugar and salt –or the enforced lack thereof – can greatly affect
your enjoyment of culinary delights. And in some case, limit what you can enjoy
eating together as a family. My father can’t (or the more operative word,
shouldn’t) be partaking of fast food, where sugar, salt and oil are present in
artery-clogging abundance. It often means that quick eating solutions are far
from ideal for me or my mother, far less for my father.
One local disadvantage I must point out is that the social
services to support the disabled community, visually-impaired included, are
woefully underdeveloped. Because some of these adjustments I have mentioned apply to more than just the
visually-impaired person, I feel that there should be more counselling and
information services for the families and caregivers of the impaired. It is all
well and good to teach a blind man to use a cane, read Braille or develop a
useful skill but we who have to cohabit his/her world and coordinate lives
within it need assistance too in handling this new situation. And that
assistance is severely lacking in sweet T&T.
Adjustments may not always be or seem negative; sometimes
there are positive ones. Before his blindness, my father would hardly use the
computer, even though he had one at his personal disposal. Now that he is
blind, he uses the computer daily to perform a variety of tasks, including
using email and accessing news online. How does he do that, you might ask?
Well, there are software platforms developed called screen readers, like JAWS
(Job Access With Speech), that can read out to you any text that appears
on-screen. With this installed on the system and learning to navigate using the
keyboard, folks like my father have an appreciation of and presence in the
cyber-world.
One thing I must tell you is that T&T society has not
been the kindest it could be to the visually-impaired community, especially
when it comes to employment opportunities. For decades, blind persons have been
seen as more of a nuisance and bother and we sighted ones tended to cast them
aside as we progressed, casting little thought to how developments should
affect and include them. There was a time that being blind usually meant a life
of making handicraft baskets or exploring some musical talent. I am proud to say
that my father was one of the first blind persons in this country who
re-entered the labour force after initially exiting it due to blindness. In
other societies this may be commonplace but here that is a rarity! And he
served as Executive Officer of the Trinidad & Tobago Blind Welfare
Association for two years.
One of my fellow contributor to this great blogsohpere, Kizie Collins,
has her own blog called
Living In Silence, which is dedicated to discussing some
challenges faced by the hearing-impaired community. Although the disabilities
we face are not similar, the struggles and adjustments we make have significant
overlap, as I learned from
this post. And it is our hope that we can shed some
light on these struggles, allowing you to have a better understanding and
appreciation of this section of our populace. And if you need more information
about the visually- or hearing-impaired community, please feel free to contact
us.
