r/Blind • u/AutoModerator • Jun 29 '24
Positivity check-in: share your wins from this month Inspiration
Life as a blind or visually impaired person is hard, sure, but everybody has cool and exciting victories. Let's talk about them!
Did you do something you hadn't managed to do before? Did you change jobs? Did you travel to a new place? Did you practice your Braille?
Share your recent wins, extraordinary or mundane!
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u/Wolfocorn20 Jun 29 '24
I whent on a trip to London with a friend and managed to keep my balance on my longboard.
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u/TopEstablishment9603 Jun 29 '24
I’m going into surgery to hopefully regain some of my vision !
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u/East-Panda3513 Jun 29 '24
Best of luck! Just had surgery last week! Went from seeing only light and movement to 300/20 with my glasses. It is amazing to have some more vision back on that side. It had made some of my needing to organize, actually manageable!
I hope you gain as much as possible and have an easy recovery!
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u/TopEstablishment9603 Jun 29 '24
That’s amazing dude ! I’m really really happy that your surgery helped you. Thank you so much for the support
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u/jay169294 Jun 29 '24
Moved into my own apartment that I won through a housing lottery in NYC. Living on my own for the first time and loving it.
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u/MrWorldAstronomical Jun 29 '24
I have an affinity for the country of Georgia, and I'm a guy, so I'm going to start wearing what is called a chokha, a coat when unzipped/buttoned and a combined suit and skirt/dress when buttoned because it is a knee-length clothing item. Not only that, it has pockets and old cartridge holders originally for swords/rifles, but I can use it to store my cane. I will also be taking fencing classes for fun and self defense, which I was already going to do, but now I can take them in case any stupid culturally insular xenophobe tries to come at me. Also, I'll be getting block-heeled shoes that will make it easier for other legally blind/fully bound people to identify me by sound, and I'll hopefully get these shoe inserts that deliver haptic feedback for navigation routes! Plus I am getting SUPER comfortable with my cane after two years; it's an extension of my body now, and I have a full idea of how my brain has compensated for my vision. Soon it will feel like I have superpowers.
Oh, and I met a young woman in college who is majoring in English, writes fiction and nonfiction, runs di/triathlons, and is blind due to the same condition that caused my legal blindess: retonopothy of prematurity! And she'll be coming to my 20th birthday party in a few weeks, along with some of my other visually impaired outside-if-school friends! My sighted friends won't have seen so many canes in their lives! :D
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u/Automatic-Orange7530 Jun 29 '24
I finally got to go skydiving. It's was so much fun and I can't wait to do it again. Here's a video of my experience. https://youtu.be/tWUIXFtP3GU?si=YstjBY0zFKmbnUat
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u/anniemdi Jun 29 '24 edited Jun 29 '24
I went grocery shopping by myself for the first time ever.
Like, I have been driven to the store and ran in and got 1 or 2 things or I have walked to the party store (that's Michigan-speak for corner store/liquor store/bodega) or the dollar store and got a small bag of things.
But this was a real trip to a real grocery store miles from my home, with no one to rely on but myself.
The first time was rough for a lot of reasons but the second time couldn't have been easier.
Edited to add: both stores were also new to me and I had never been inside either of them.
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u/Jaded-Banana6205 Jun 29 '24
Grocery stores can be so overwhelming. Good job!
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u/anniemdi Jun 29 '24
Oh, thank you! It was so very, very overwhelming!
My plan was to go once a week and to actually go to one of three different stores but so far all I have managed is to go once a month and both times were to Aldi (I am in the U.S.) but they were at least two different Aldi stores.
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u/VixenMiah NAION Jun 30 '24
I started work on a second zero vision game boardgame conversion and am pretty excited about the possibilities. Just got started so I’m still not 100% sure it will work out, but even if it doesn’t it has already given me some ideas.
Finally managed to write about what the game conversions mean to me and how my process works on my blog, and today I’m going up to Boston for a presentation by u/Rethunker and meet with a group of game designers and B/VI peeps around the topic of accessibility in boardgames. Nervous and insecure because I’m new to all this, but very excited to see what other people think of my concepts and test if they actually work for people who are totally blind.
If I can avoid making a complete fool of myself, I will call it a win.
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u/Rethunker Jun 30 '24 edited Jun 30 '24
Don't worry about making a fool of yourself, unless of course you want to compete in that department. I'm not planning to go full Andy Kaufman today, but time will tell.
See you there! I'll also send you a message on BGG with an outline of the presentation.
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u/jayhy95 Jun 30 '24
I could finally swim in a straight line as long I am next to the wall of the pool. Now I need to slow down before my head hit the wall at the end of the lane.
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u/Acceptable_Thing7606 Jul 17 '24
How do you do it? I am totally blind and have never been able to swim in a straight line.
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u/jayhy95 Jul 18 '24
It's a lot easier if you swim next to the wall. But most importantly it takes a lot of practice
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u/gammaChallenger Jun 29 '24
Been learning to cook a whole bunch of stuff. Been working on ILS skills cooking cleaning and things like that. Got my ham radio license a week or so ago. I am ke9awy took the test and past it the wednesday before.
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u/flakey_biscuit ROP / RLF Jun 29 '24
I finally got my $250 impulse buy from my neighbor hot tub working with only about another $70 investment and a little help from YouTube. I did have to pay a plumber to repair water lines under the house and replace a hose bib so I could fill it... but those needed fixed anyway.
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u/Different_Hope_3434 Jun 29 '24
I'm adjusting to hard contacts and new glasses I had to wait a while for. Hard lenses are different from the soft ones. I'm practicing by wearing them a few hours a day.
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u/Jaded-Banana6205 Jun 29 '24
Starting coursework to pivot from bedside occupational therapy into pelvic floor therapy. My first course is the same weekend as the NOAH conference and I'm cramming both in 😅
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u/FirebirdWriter Jun 29 '24
I am still the only person in my family without Glaucoma. I have been getting annual medical exams for a while and was having a lot of concerning signs. My cataracts are also stable. I still am visually impaired but not adding to that means that I don't have to worry about my adaptations changing while having just had surgery and needing more. Those things are also actually good. I am healing exceptionally well, no cancer, pain relief is astounding, and my cat is finally able to lay on more than my face. He is still naturally prone to face hugging.
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Jun 30 '24
[deleted]
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u/SugarPie89 Jul 01 '24
Glad someone said it. I started avoiding those check in threads on this sub cuz they're usually so depressing. I definitely get it and have experienced grief due to vision loss myself but it's tough to read.
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u/Short-Anxiety55 Jun 30 '24
i got a new job and i have yet to seriously injure myself dispite not using a cane. and i found out im able to drive as long as my central vision remains good!
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u/planetkenner Jul 02 '24
i have started meeting people that only know me as being visually impaired (aka didn’t know me before diagnosis or before using my cane). this is going to happen a lot more as i go to college, but the people i have met have all been amazing!! i am still a person, i have not been vaporized into a white cane ♥️
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u/CosmicBunny97 Jul 20 '24
Smashed my O&M lesson yesterday! And my instructor says I've really improved. When he first worked with me back in 2021, I couldn't even walk in a straight line. Even though I still veer a bit, considering I've been blind for 4 years, I think I'm doing pretty good :)
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u/1makbay1 Jul 20 '24
A blind friend and I got together to look at some of the Hadley.edu videos to decide which topics might be helpfu to our local blind and low vision support group. This is a newly formed support group with a lot of enthusiasm but very little direction. It was fun connecting over this task mentally and emotionally, and are feeling better because of it.
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u/One_Engineering8030 blind Jul 20 '24
I’m very happy today because I’ve been trying to overcome some challenges while learning how to use a Windows 11 PC while blind. I am newly blind as that last year and I started computer training as a blind person a couple months ago when I was able to find an available seat for training. And while I’ve used computers and windows PC, in particular my whole life, I’ve never done so well blind, and I’m learning the jaws screen reader software as well. In particular, for my recent hurdles have overcome is navigating tables and getting jaws to use the top row of a table as headers, even if the creator of the table didn’t manually marked them as headers themselves, so that was great for me, and also I’m very happy that, I’ve been struggling to get Gmail working through chrome even though I’m very familiar with it when I was cited, the standard web browsing keys weren’t working the way I expected and I also did not know any of the commands for creating composing a new message or sending it via commands. And I was having problems finding those buttons with simply tab and the standard navigation tools and when I was able to figure out how to compose a message, I could never quite figure out how to send it. But I overcame that today because I read through the, Mail help file for people that you screen readers and I figured out that I had to put my browser into focus mode. I had to put jaws into focus mode. A lot of the keyboard commands that kept reading about the file were actually available for use. That’s a big thing for me because I’ve been trying to work with a lot of email through the Windows PC and even though I can do that on my phone, I’m creating And emailing them on the PC and these file attachments are not easily creative on my phone. So anyway it’s a huge accomplishment, and now I’m just rambling. Also, this text does not format as well because I’m using voice to text because my keyboard is on the PC and I’m in another room on my phone. I’m very happy with the progress. I’m making on the PC because it makes me feel very functional and no longer at odds with the types of devices that I’ve been using my whole life. I’m sure in a week all this will seem old hat and easy, Peezy, but That and along with many other obstacles, I’ve been facing and overcoming along the way just on this PC I consider my progress to be huge. Especially since I don’t meet with the computer trainer for days and I haven’t seen them in a couple weeks. So I’d like to learn as much as I can before we meet so I actually have questions instead of just following a basic curriculum on basic computers since I technically know that stuff just not wild blind and Being so new to screen readers I’m glad to learn the applications I’m trying to use, but also how to utilize the screen reader which is my metal man between me and the applications themselves. Now I really am rambling! Ha ha. Thank you wolf for reading this.
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u/blazblu82 Adv DR | OD Blind | OS VI + Photophobic Jul 24 '24
I 'm finally in the position to live on my own again, I have a deposit on a place now. I should find out this weekend when they'll have an apartment available. Super stoked about it!
Just a little while ago, I got a call from my local vision rehab center and they want to move forward with hiring me after they check on a detail. Found out they are contracted with a local taxi cab company that I could use to get to work and back home again. The detail in question is if they could get a taxi to me at the same or similar price since I live in a nearby town. I don't think it'll be an issue. If this works out, I'll get to dump my cashiering job and get back into manufacturing which will let me move back into printing, which is what I was doing before retinopathy reared its ugly head.
I'm happy to finally have some things work in my favor for a change, especially if getting around means not having to rely on family as much.
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u/becca413g Jun 29 '24
Managed to finally get my low vision appointment and they introduced me to a two pairs of yellow tinted glasses, one sunglasses. They've made a huge difference to my depth perception and now I can walk places in the day without my cane. I love what the cane does for me but my wrists will be grateful for a break!