I was born nearly two months early after my Mum had suffered Rubella during pregnancy. Consequently, my eyes were already in bad shape when they put me in an incubator without patches over my eyes to counter the high oxygen environment (something they would later learn to do differently). The best estimate is that I had around 5% eyesight when my parents took me home from the hospital. Relative to how many things could have gone wrong after this combination of circumstances, I regularly remind myself that I was lucky.
It would be easy to say that I have been defined by my blindness, but, for me, this is neither an acceptable nor accurate perspective. My life has been defined by how I learned and have chosen to
respond to being blind.
As a very little human my parents became concerned that I couldn’t see in daylight and didn’t like bright light. In darkness I would become more active and animated, and vampire jokes were made. One day while I was doing my own thing in my sandpit in the relative shade beneath a grape vine my uncle put his welding mask over my head and, for the first time, I reached up and picked a bunch of grapes. This was a very big event that I don’t remember. From this point onwards my family had a better understanding of what was going on with my eyes and had a foundation from which to work out what could be done to enable me to do more things.