October 14, 2010
This is the first week of my weekly blog…The Adventures of the Newly Blind/Low Vision/Visually Impaired Girl.
My aim with this blog is to chronicle the weird, scary, funny, outrageous, and tragic things that occur in my daily life as I transition from a sighted to a non-sighted person.
On July 24 I was smacked or whacked in the eyes (or the lucky recipient of a high velocity blunt force trauma). In a not so wise moment I put two of those tube resistance bands with the handles together using some clips they had on the end of them and then attached them to the top of a doorframe to do back pulls. On my last rep I felt something hit me and I was blind, what I know now is that I basically killed the macula in both retinas, and the retina is part of your brain, so it’s pretty important. As a result of the freak accident I have no center vision, so there is a blank spot in the middle of my visual field. I can see out of my periphery, which is a handy thing. So this leads to interesting things like seeing headless bodies, which can be useful at times because I have decided that since I can’t see anyone’s facial expressions I can pretty much say whatever I want because I can’t tell if people are reacting with disdain or disgust or if they think something’s funny. Those of you that know me are probably thinking didnt she say what she was thinking before. I was actually holding back.
Another interesting thing is that you can retrain yourself to use the functioning parts of your retina so I will be engaging in a retinal retraining program to reorganize my visual cortex and working out the parts of my retina that still work. So that’s cool your brain can do that. It’s good that I still have brain cells left (despite what happened in the late eighties and early nineties). Although right now they are saying “What the heck are you doing? You’re not supposed to be reading out of here. I’m not sure what this word is.” But I’m getting better. It’s a daily learning process.
I probably should explain the use of the terms blind/low vision/visually impaired. I am one of those people that is legally blind, but not totally blind, but not exactly low vision. I have been told that to be low vision I have to be able to read font zoomed at 5 times it size and right now I can read font at about 7 times it size, which is really huge for you but not so much for me. So my goal is to work towards 5 times. Although I really don’t want to label myself as anything because as Kierkegaard says “Once you label me, you negate me” and I really don’t want to negate myself. But I think a good acronym for me is I’m a BLOVI person, so I will be using that term here to for.
I have lots of stories to tell so in future blogs you will be hearing about these topics:
Keep moving forward,
Beth “BLOVI” Medlock
My aim with this blog is to chronicle the weird, scary, funny, outrageous, and tragic things that occur in my daily life as I transition from a sighted to a non-sighted person.
On July 24 I was smacked or whacked in the eyes (or the lucky recipient of a high velocity blunt force trauma). In a not so wise moment I put two of those tube resistance bands with the handles together using some clips they had on the end of them and then attached them to the top of a doorframe to do back pulls. On my last rep I felt something hit me and I was blind, what I know now is that I basically killed the macula in both retinas, and the retina is part of your brain, so it’s pretty important. As a result of the freak accident I have no center vision, so there is a blank spot in the middle of my visual field. I can see out of my periphery, which is a handy thing. So this leads to interesting things like seeing headless bodies, which can be useful at times because I have decided that since I can’t see anyone’s facial expressions I can pretty much say whatever I want because I can’t tell if people are reacting with disdain or disgust or if they think something’s funny. Those of you that know me are probably thinking didnt she say what she was thinking before. I was actually holding back.
Another interesting thing is that you can retrain yourself to use the functioning parts of your retina so I will be engaging in a retinal retraining program to reorganize my visual cortex and working out the parts of my retina that still work. So that’s cool your brain can do that. It’s good that I still have brain cells left (despite what happened in the late eighties and early nineties). Although right now they are saying “What the heck are you doing? You’re not supposed to be reading out of here. I’m not sure what this word is.” But I’m getting better. It’s a daily learning process.
I probably should explain the use of the terms blind/low vision/visually impaired. I am one of those people that is legally blind, but not totally blind, but not exactly low vision. I have been told that to be low vision I have to be able to read font zoomed at 5 times it size and right now I can read font at about 7 times it size, which is really huge for you but not so much for me. So my goal is to work towards 5 times. Although I really don’t want to label myself as anything because as Kierkegaard says “Once you label me, you negate me” and I really don’t want to negate myself. But I think a good acronym for me is I’m a BLOVI person, so I will be using that term here to for.
I have lots of stories to tell so in future blogs you will be hearing about these topics:
- Dealing with doctors and subtle ways you know you are screwed.
- Cool things you can get because you are blind.
- Blind People versus Customer Service.
- The BLOVI girls’ night out on the town.
Keep moving forward,
Beth “BLOVI” Medlock
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