Blind Veteran Living and Dealing with Low Vision

Let us face the unfortunate facts of the matter. Vision loss and or becoming legally blind forces many vets to make life altering choices every day.  Learning new skills and dealing with the challenges of vision loss is a tremendous shift in any person’s routine life. It is often our service men and women who give up on the things that make life worth living, and the independence we value. Which consequently not only impacts us personally, our family and friends are also deeply affected in ways many of us fail to fully understand.

Fortunately we all want to do the very best we can to take care of our friends and family, right? For many vets, the help they need is not available to them in their home town. Traveling to a specialist many hundreds of miles away from home is not only a huge expense, many times makes us feel like we never want to go through that again, it’s simply not worth all the hassle.

The thing many vets are not aware of, as a U.S veteran there is help available for their travel needs, through the Veterans Administration, local VFW, or Lions Clubs, regardless of the reason for their vision loss. Due to illness or injury while on active duty, or non-service connected as well. Let me be clear about something, it is absolutely worth all the frustrating bull.

Hopefully you will find my personal experiences and thoughts on the matter useful. You see, the most aggravating thing for me personally, is coping with the way my vision problems adversely affect the way I go about doing everyday tasks like, cooking, cleaning and washing my own clothes. Furthermore, I find it very hard facing the reality as to how my vision loss affects my overall independence. But what choice do you or I have other than to face it head on? It's not going away. As a result of my personal VA training for the blind, I have acquired a better understanding of how to use tactile clues, talking gadgets, the iPhone and computer to make certain tasks around the house easier. Sometimes there are those little things that throw the proverbial monkey wrench in the works. That is OK; no one ever said life was going to be easy, right?

The important thing I believe we should all try to keep in mind, learning new living skills and a positive attitude will make tomorrow a much better day. The challenges we, our friends and family face will be much easier to deal with once we all learn to think about, and do things differently.

Let me ask you, how many times have you wondered how exactly do other blind people do so many amazing things without the use of their sight? For instance, cooking a delicious meal, build cool stuff like jewelry boxes, or kitchen cabinets, sew patchwork quilts and needle point, or many things we all enjoy doing. Just maybe you are a creative person wondering how on earth blind folks like me and you, not only write but also publish articles online about stuff we can do.

Simple, using tactile clues we have used all our life we didn’t even realize we use, and learning new ones along the way and maintaining our independence, is how.

The biggest challenge for many folks with low vision is simply deciding to learn new manual skills. These skills can make many everyday tasks doable and worthwhile for the visually impaired.  Let me assure you, it truly is worth all the time and effort you put into learning and mastering ways to live life to the fullest again.

Get help that makes walking up and down stairs, finding your way in large cities, small towns and rural areas which all have their little quirks

I dare say for many Americans like you and me who’ve been responsible citizens of our communities, learning to deal with the challenges low vision, and of course legally blind vets, the hardest thing we are forced to give up is our driver’s license. With this we forfeit the many privileges we have enjoyed most of our adult lives associated with jumping in the car driving to do anything we want or need. For those of us that rely on the mass transit system in our cities, learning to navigate our neighborhood without the use of our sight guiding us is overwhelming to put it mildly. That is of course until we learn techniques that make finding our way easier. The VA will provide you with these valuable skills.

Let’s face it; those electronic message boards are hard for normal sighted people to make sense of, let alone someone with low vision issues.

Further adding to the frustration, there are those of us that refuse to ask for directions, or help of any kind. Sound familiar? Let me dismiss a commonly held belief among many vets. Using a blind person’s cane, or other adaptive technology, and yes even asking for help when it is needed is not a sign of weakness, quite the contrary. Simply learning how to use and presenting properly the white with red tip blind person cane and other orientation mobility skills is a declaration of one’s independence.

While attending Hines Blind Center each veteran has Individual Instructors dedicated to providing Individual training. As a legally blind veteran living and dealing with low vision problems everyday myself, I do have a better than average understanding of what it takes to learn new living, manual and orientation and mobility skills. I myself have attended the Hines Blind Center on more than one occasion. I had the honor to interact with vets ranging in experience from the youngest service men and women, too WWII vets learning new computer skills that made it possible for them to send and receive e-mail, post to Facebook and participate in their favorite forums, how cool is that? Yes the dedicated folks at Hines Blind Center are caring professionals that work hard to develop a program tailored to meet the needs of each individual vet, no one size fits all approach

You may be the type person mainly interested in learning how to do all those handyman projects. Discovering the little tips and trick that make the most of the vision you have left, using tactile clues and measuring devices designed specifically for use by the blind. That will make it possible for you to make accurate measurements to within the nearest sixteenth of an inch and perform necessary repair and maintenance tasks you find fun and rewarding.

Then again, your interests may center on the culinary arts and working in the kitchen or barbecue. Me too, grilling the perfect steak, chops, fish and veggies is something I enjoy doing, oh yeah, by the way the wife and kids really enjoy eating all the things I cook. If I can learn to do all this, you can also.  Learn how to do using a few cool kitchen gadgets, safe tactile clues that make cooking and food prep fun and rewarding once more.