The process of learning to live with blindness & hearing loss
I am using this blogging site to keep friends and family informed about my life for the next 7 months or so of blindness training at the Colorado Center for the Blind. I have Usher's syndrome which results in hearing loss and progressive vision loss. Now the state of Colorado is paying for me to go through an extensive training program. There will be lots of challenges ahead for me and I am both apprehensive and excited!!!! The training consist of being blindfolded 8 hours a day 5 days a week and learning how to function completely without sight.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Roadblocks
So far I have still been doing well with my sleep shades and not allowing myself to peek. I get more and more comfortable with them the longer I make it too. Today during travel we needed to catch a bus to our destination. Well I went as fast as I could to keep from being late and we missed the bus by about 2 minutes. So we walked....crossed lots of driveways, small roads, roads with medians, and two major intersections. It was exhausting and required more brain work than I would care to put in. Well at one point we were crossing a small road and had to listen to our parallel traffic on Littleton Ave (which is a big road). I was trying to follow traffic and started to veer. Well the cars that saw me coming would move over into the far lane to keep from hitting me and continue past. Problem was I was focused on making sure I was lined up with traffic that as the cars moved over I also moved over...soon I was wondering why I hadn't hit the other curb yet and found out that I was actually walking in the middle of Littleton Ave. That is a major road and is really the wrong place to be. My travel instructor called me back and I was able to quickly realize the problem and move to my right to correct for it. Gosh I hate how badly I do with following traffic and localizing sounds. I try and maybe it isn't something I can change, but I really want to see if I can figure out a way to do this. So far I am still alive so that is a good sign!!! I also crossed a few of them pretty well so instead of only focusing on what I did wrong (even if it was a major one) I should still see what I've done well. Otherwise it can be very discouraging!!!
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