The Adventures of the Blind/Low Vision/Visually Impaired (BLOVI) Girl-Volume 64: What I Can See and How I Can Fool You
It has been just over 20 months since my accident and I still get questions about my eyes healing or my vision improving or even what I can see. The truth is my vision has been the same since the blood cleared out of my eyes in October of 2010, but my brain has been reorganizing itself to its new visual field and therefore I appear as if I see better. The second part of what I see has to do with the way people treat me as a differently abled person, I am treated differently, and not in a good way and that I can see very clearly. These subjects are the focus of this blog. But first…………………..
This week my WTF is the loss of all my important documents. I recently discovered, after making a trip to my lock box to retrieve my passport and my daughter’s birth certificate, that I no longer had a lock box. After some digging it was found the ex closed the box in November 2010 during the custody battle. I did not know this, I was only told he was taking his items out of the box and he gave ne his key. At the time of closing someone has to watch you take all the items out of the box and the bank assured me it had been emptied. So the million dollar question is where are items like my passport, my will, my daughter’s social security card and birth certificate, etc. The story has changed many times as to what happened. The end result is that all those items have disappeared. So I now have two options, to file a police report that the items were stolen or to do nothing and go through the agonizing process of restoring all these items. The passport process alone could do me in. All I know is this sucks!!!!!
This week I can’t get enough of the return of Mad Men, my absolute most favorite show on TV. So even though the premiere dragged a little I was more focused on the set decoration and clothes. Lately I have been fixated on a royal blue/teal color and a reddish orange and gray as a color scheme to redo my den and bedroom. I have been trying to visualize it in my head. And then, there it was all over the place on Mad Men. Tons of orange walls and blue walls and blue and red-orange couches mixed with with gray taupe and it so worked. I would like to transport Don Drapers’ living room, sans the white carpet, into my house. I love everything about the rooms on Mad Men; the lamps the artwork—I want it all. Also I am requesting Megan Draper’s entire wardrobe. She wore this awesome black dress at the surprise party that I would totally rock. I even liked Peggy's black dress with the white center piping. That show inspires me. I am ready to take on a few room redo’s. And it is going to be bright and mod.
Speaking of bright, my visual impairment has caused me to want brighter colors around me because I can see them better. My visual acuity has not changed, still 20/800 in the left eye and 20/400 in the right eye. I still have little central vision and your head is still mostly missing if I look directly ay you, I have just learned where to look to make eye contact. And my brain is filling in the gaps with what it thinks should be there, not just with color bands and flashes, even though I still see some yellow. The color bleeding when I would look from a colored wall to a white surface is also gone. I still can’t recognize anyone from a short distance, but I am getting better at voice recognition. I also navigate better because once I have walked or run a path my brain is making a visual spatial map of it so I can remember where there is a step or a turn. My balance is better. At first it felt as if I were walking sideways but now I feel no different than I did as a sighted person and I am just the same clumsy me I was before. My other senses have continued to sharpen, especially my hearing. I use my hearing all the time to gage the distance of cars when I am crossing streets and I can find a small pill that has dropped on the floor not because I immediately see it, but because I can approximate where it fell by the sound. I think it’s like the echolocation of a bat. Because of these things, to most people it appears as though I am a sighted person.
I still need technology to help me work and read. My next project is a big LED TV because I found that when looking at them in a store at some distance I could make out more of what was going on and that was great. I really need it before True Blood comes back on. I have also found I need to have a bigger screen when I navigate the web because there us so much content it is hard to find all the buttons and catch all the pop-ups when you are zoomed up. So my plan is to begin using my TV as my monitor, which I am figuring out how to do as inexpensively as possible. I have magnification glasses where I can read 14 font and sometimes 12 but these often fail me at meetings or when trying to read documents or a menu at a dark restaurant. There are new portable magnification units that could help but they cost tons of money. What I have learned is that the technology is available, but it is super expensive. The portable reader is over 1200 dollars. In fact, many of the aids for those that are blind or low vision seem unnecessarily expensive. I was lucky to get the equipment I needed from the Commission for the Blind, but as technology gets better and I figure out my needs there is no mechanism to upgrade unless it is out of pocket. I am not sure how low vision people can afford what they really need and could be useful. My guess is that they don’t have access to these things. And that is sad.
What I also see is how I am treated differently because I am differently abled. Some behaviors are subtle, some less so. Since I have been visually impaired people that don’t know me sometimes assume I am less smart than I really am. In some ways I feel smarter or maybe more resourceful, but I have been talked down to more often than I ever was when I was sighted. The other thing is that I have had more people try to take advantage of me. What I will say is usually someone can only pull that crap once. I am thankful I am assertive. I have also realized that there is some discrimination against the visually impaired and blind. Many companies with which I have dealt say they have no way to send me things electronically so I end up filling out paper documents under my camera which takes twice the time. There are also situations where you have to pick something up in person, which is not as easy for someone that does not drive. And don’t even get me started on ADA compliance, which is a joke. Then there are the subtle ways things have changed. It takes the form of people assuming you cannot do certain things, people not realizing you are relying on them to be someplace and get back home, or people just avoiding you in general. As I have written about before, these things have been disappointing, but I am beginning to understand they are part of the new world in which I live. Having a disability is the same as having other baggage. And some people are worried they may have to help carry the load. This in my case is really not true.
I will not talk about all the things I miss about having sight, because I don’t find that productive. I will say my attitude is and probably will remain positive. And I have every hope and faith that stem cells will allow we to regain my sight in less than 10 years. And at my age, the years are flying by.
Keep Moving Forward,
Beth (BLOVI) Medlock
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