EVERETT — Jane Reno knew she was losing her vision, but when the doctor confirmed it, she still got upset. She thought about her choices. There had to be support available, people who were going through the same thing.
On Monday, she attended the monthly support group for the visually impaired at the Carl Gipson Senior Center in Everett. This month’s topic was dealing with medication, prescription bottles and pharmacists.
“We’re a peer group. Everybody’s equal, and we learn from each other, ” said Gloria Riley, who moved to Everett last year. Riley attended one of the support groups in 2014 and went back for one in January.
She was told the former leader had died. The senior center director asked Riley if she could lead the group. Her February group had two people attend. August’s meeting had 14. They talked about devices that can help visually impaired people with chores. Someone brought a scale with an electronic voice that reads out the weight. They laughed about that: Who wants their weight read aloud?
The group encourages loved ones and caregivers to join them.
“Family, friends have no concept of what our vision range is or how we see the world,” Riley said.
She owns a set of cardboard eyeglasses that simulate the different kinds of vision problems. She has retinitis pigmentosa, a heredity disease that causes failing eyesight. The glasses that simulate her disease are solid cardboard, with pencil-sized holes to see through. She has no side vision or depth perception: Stairs are dangerous, because they appear to her as flat ground.
Underneath fluorescent lights, “it’s like I’m looking through a white fog, and it isn’t sharp or clear,” she said.
Her brother was blind all of his adult life, also from retinitis pigmentosa. She worked in bookkeeping and as an emergency dispatcher before retirement. She’s not one for crying, but still, she remembers the first time she knocked over a glass of water in a restaurant. She couldn’t see the clear plastic. She sobbed. Now she always warns her waitress.
When Riley’s brother died in 2007, he hadn’t lost hope that a cure for their disease would be found during his sister’s lifetime.
“We’re not going to give up because we’re tough,” she said.
There’s no cast on her arm, or bandage on her head, she said. It’s a problem often faced by the visually impaired. Their disability can be invisible, and every one’s vision is different, and that doesn’t always match people’s assumptions.
Albert Heimdahl’s glasses shield his left eye from view. Heimdahl, who once trained as a chemist and later worked in personnel management, has macular degeneration and glaucoma. After all these years, his loved ones still are learning not to surprise him on his left side, he said.
The group shares life’s successes, tips and tricks, frustrations and struggles.
Riley heard of a woman who learned to have her slacks folded differently if they were black or brown, so her outfit would match. Riley found she could put two rubber bands on a medication bottle, so she’d know to take two of those pills at a time. Recently, addressing envelopes stopped her. For Edmonds ZIP codes, the sixes and zeros were indistinguishable.
The technology is always changing. When Heimdahl was studying chemistry, he had a slide rule and punched cards for calculations. Now, his granddaughter made him get a smartphone, and his friends tell him his phone could do the same math for him.
Dave Mitchel is a former truck driver and retired counselor who has been legally blind for more than 30 years. He likes Siri, the iPhone computer personality. He uses Siri to organize his bus schedule and remind him to take his pills. On Monday, he donated a Braille label maker to the senior center. He also works on old cars. He knows them by touch. When he drops a nut or a bolt, he listens to hear where it bounces, he said.
“What kind of vision do you live with?” Riley asked him.
“None,” he said. “Light and dark. I don’t see shapes and shadows anymore.”
Barb Vosburgh lost her peripheral vision after two strokes and a surgery. It’s more difficult to make the bed now. “I don’t get upset,” she said. “I had enough pity parties and nobody ever came.” She plays in the senior center’s video game bowling league. She’s learning loom knitting and she’s picked up a hand-held version of the harp. It makes a sweet sound when the strings are touched.
“Does that open the door to heaven?,” Heimdahl asked her, always the teaser. When his neighbors’ young children told him that his glasses make him look like a pirate, he told them that sometimes people turn into pirates when they get older.
Jane Reno was 4 for her first eye exam. Technology and inventions prolonged her vision for years — a gift, she said. Little things can surprise her: What to her looks like a dessert might turn out to be beet salad.
What bothers her most is the reading. She likes to read, and it’s getting harder.
“You can’t sit around and say I’m not going to do anything, so I do the best I can,” she said.
Rikki King: 425-339-3449; rking@heraldnet.com.
More info
The VIP, or Visually Impaired People, support group meets the third Monday of every month at the Carl Gipson Senior Center, 3025 Lombard Ave., Everett. More information: 425-257-8780.
The Greater Everett Area Council of the Blind plans an outreach meeting from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Everett Public Library, 2702 Hoyt Ave.
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