Adjustments

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 59^th 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’.

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

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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.