The Blind Vampire Hunter (8 page)

Everyone in our department was an internal
programmer, designing programs and program systems for other
departments within the corporation. Most programs eventually were
exported onto computers within these other departments for their
use. Some programs were developed for other departments that we
kept and used to run report updates for them either quarterly or
yearly. Some of these programs continued to use mainframe tapes as
a source of data input; some required our manual input through the
keyboard. The CCTV magnifier was very useful on these jobs.

While my peripheral vision continued to
decay, my central vision remained the same. Since the major loss of
vision, my central vision had developed a new problem. Use of my
vision for reading would tire my eyesight quickly. I have always
been a bookworm, but now I was using the Kurzweil for both program
development and leisure reading. As I am an ardent reader of horror
books, I’d get comments from my fellow programmers who would
complain how I was grossing them out.

To keep my bookworm fed, I also became a
member of
Talking Book Topics.

Talking Book Topics
is a Library of
Congress program to supply reading material for the blind and
physically handicapped in the form of Braille books, books on
records and books on cassettes. Special equipment is needed and
provided for the records and books on cassettes. The records play
at a special slow speed; while the books on cassettes play at a
special slow speed and on four tracks (instead of the normal two
tracks). All these materials come as “Material for the Blind and
Physically Handicapped” and are delivered and returned in the mail
at no cost. (Later, in the new millennium, books on records are
long gone history. Cassette books are being phased out for the new
digital book system. With the new digital system, you can still get
books mailed to you to be used with your digital book reader, or
you may download books onto your computer and move them to your
digital book machine using a flash card.)

In the mid-90’s my wife and I were gifted
with a beautiful two-headed daughter. Being female, she was quite
stubborn about coming out of her nice warm mother, so much so that
the doctor had to use tongs to help pull her out. With my poor
eyesight, the use of the tongs gave her a two-headed look that they
promised me would be gone by the next day. True to their word, the
next day my beautiful little girl had only one head; I know because
I checked. It did not escape me that I still had the eyesight to
enjoy seeing my daughter’s birth.

Two months before our family was to grow by
one, I was laid off. The corporation had been fighting for its
existence for years and, losing the fight, had sold itself to
another corporation; a corporation that already had its own
department of internal programmers, so it axed my whole department
right up to the VP. We were just the first to go. Today the
corporation that had been so good to me for seventeen years no
longer exists.

With my wife having the higher salary as an
executive secretary, and as I was wrestling with my sleep apnea, it
was decided that I would go on disability, be a Mr. Mom, and take
care of our daughter with the assistance of my sister-in-law,
Chris. Seems she was a babysitter back in Ohio, mainly because she
lived in such a small town that no matter where she was
babysitting, if there was an emergency she could always go next
door for help. So here she could help with her niece, even if I was
busy in bed trying to get some quality sleep. If an emergency would
come about she only had to wake me. Wouldn’t you know the only
emergency we had with Elaine came while I was the only one home
with her. Chris had fed her, but had to leave before Elaine had
received her juice. I was asked to give Elaine her juice, and then
let her out of her high chair. While drinking her juice, Elaine
started choking and wheezing. I got her out of her high chair and
started pounding her back at an angle that I hoped would free
whatever she was chocking on, but not hurt her. (I knew it was
dangerous to give a baby or young child the Heimlich maneuver.) I
rushed her to the couch and, after sitting her down, I ran back
into the kitchen and grabbed up the phone to call 911.

After I got off the phone, I noticed my
little darling was just sitting there with her arm in her mouth,
looking as if she was wondering if Daddy had just gone nuts. She
was never a thumb sucker; instead she would put her arm in her
mouth and suck on it.

EMS arrived and found that all was well. Just
the same, they suggested she be seen by her doctor, so that evening
we saw the baby doctor. During the visit, we figured out what had
happened. Chris had given her raisins with her lunch. One of the
raisins had gotten lodged in her gums and had come loose when she
was drinking her juice.

Just a note on white cane use I believe is
required due to moviemakers that don’t bother researching things
like the lifestyle of the blind. Blind people do not use a white
cane getting around their own home. We might not even use the white
cane in other places outside our home which are well known to us.
For example, I don’t use my white cane while visiting my parents.
This can sometimes be painful, for instance when someone leaves a
dining-room chair out or makes a change in the living room
furniture and forgets to tell the blind member of the family of the
changes. At work, I was introduced to a fellow blind employee who
was now totally blind from RP. He told me that he had gotten into
the habit of leaving his white cane behind when going to the men’s
room. He would walk out of the office, feel the hallway wall, then
feel his way to the rest rooms. He always knew what door to use,
because in his building, all the men’s room doors opened to the
left and all the women’s rooms opened to the right. One day while
feeling his way down the hallway, he painfully discovered, nose
first, that someone in the next department was getting a new desk
and that the old desk was sitting propped up at an angle against
the hallway wall. His hand had slipped between the wall and the
desk. He also told me that after his department had moved to a new
building, the left-right rest room door system failed him as he
walked into a left opening door and a bunch of female employees
yelled, “Eric, you’re in the wrong rest room.” Eric just responded,
“No problem, I can’t see anything.” He was quickly escorted
out.

I had a similar experience once. While
vacationing in Florida and visiting Epcot Center, I overheard a man
say he was going to use the men’s room. It sounded like a good
idea, so I told my wife I was going to use the men’s room. “Need
help finding it?” she asked.

“No, I’m just going to follow that man
in.”

It was a bright, sunny day and the man was
wearing dark clothes. I figured I could handle it. When I followed
the person into the rest room, a crowd of women all started
screaming–-somehow I followed the wrong person right into the
ladies’ room. I did not know women could scream in so many
accents.

With the purchase of the house, our finances
had become tight. The plain was for both Diana and I to grow in our
careers with this growth including higher wages and more income. It
had not been in our plains for me to go on disability.

With me on disability, money was getting even
tighter, too tight(er). We spend nights tossing around varies ideas
to bring in more money. Nothing seemed plausible, things were
looking down right depressing until ...

We started talking about renting out the room
that had previously been used by my mother-in-law. It was now
basically an unused guest room. As we don’t have that many
over-night guests, an extremely unused guest room.

My wife had some reservations.

The first problem was that with a household
of mostly women there were concerns about renting a room to a
strange man. The solution was that the renter would have to be a
female.

Another problem was that a renter would want
some use of the refrigerator. Our refrigerator was already
overused, was often full and was showing its age (yet another
reason to look for additional income). The solution was to buy a
bigger refrigerator. So once we decided that a renter was a
plausible solution, we took money from savings and with financing,
we bought a bigger refrigerator that even had the capacity to be
sectioned so the renter could have her own area within the
refrigerator.

Diana placed ads in the paper and interviewed
possible candidates for the room. I lost track of how many came and
went because Diana saw some problem with them.

With potential renters coming and going
faster than I change my socks, I was beginning to believe there
never would be a renter. It was beginning to look like no one could
live up to my wife’s standards as a renter.

I had become so busy with the local Chapter
of NFB (National Federation of the Blind) that I was voted in as
VP. My first duty was to help organize bake sales during the
Memorial Day weekend to help raise money to get members to the
yearly NFB convention, to be held in Dallas, Texas, this year. It
was my job to go to various shops and ask permission to set up our
bake sales. As we have been doing this for years, in the same
locations without any problems, this was a piece of cake.

I’d only been to two conventions in the past.
One was in D.C. so being basically local, I had no need for a hotel
room, and no food cost to worry about. The second convention I
attended was in Florida. Since it was the summer after I got
married, Diana and I, while attending some of the meetings that
most interested me, mostly made a vacation of it. This year I felt
strongly about going as my duty in my role as VP. Fortunately as
VP, the chapter would be covering some of my costs. This year the
bake sales went so well that most of my costs were subsidized.
About a dozen members who wanted to attend this year’s convention
did attend, including six who would not have been able to afford to
go without the help of people who not only bought up our home-baked
cakes, pies and cookies, but left generous donations as well.

With the convention two months away, life
went on, with my wife going to work; me trying to get some decent
sleep due to the sleep apnea, and Chris and I taking care of little
Elaine. Chris was great with baby Elaine, except she refused to
change dirty diapers. That duty fell on daddy or mommy when they
were home. One day, I walked into the living room to find Auntie
Chris sitting down to a movie while baby Elaine enjoyed her toys in
her playpen. When the credits for
Nightmare on Elm Street
came up, I looked at baby Elaine and quickly decided this was not a
good idea. Auntie Chris agreed and found something a little more
family-oriented to watch. About a year or so later, I brought home
a used copy of Chuck Norris (Saturday type) cartoons called Chuck
Norris: Karate Kommandos. Elaine and I watched them together, until
during the 3
^rd
cartoon, I discovered that my little girl
was kickboxing her teddy bear. I watched the rest of the cartoons
on the VHS after my little kickboxer was down for a nap.

The possible renters interviewed by Diana for
the guest room just kept coming and going. I got to figuring we
were in no danger of losing a guest room anytime soon.

One weekday morning I awoke to the sounds of
my wife getting ready for work. I was surprised to see it was so
grey in the room, I recalled the weather man calling for a bright
and sunny day. Possibly the weather man was wrong again. Instead of
the sunny day called for, it looked like a dark, cloudy day,
possibly with rain on the way, but I currently was hearing no
pitter-patter of rain on the roof.

I said to Diana, “Di is the sun up yet?”

“It’s just starting to get light out; that’s
why I have the bedside light on.”

Looking in the direction of the bedside light
and still seeing nothing but grayness, “Di?”

Hearing the concern creeping into my voice, I
heard her stop what she was doing and answer, “Yes, Hon. What is
it?”

“Di, I’m blind.”

Thinking it some joke, she replied, “Yes,
Hon, I know. I’m the one who takes you to John Hopkins for testing,
remember.”

“No Di.” I continued, fighting to keep my
voice from wobbling with the building emotion I was feeling, “I’m
totally blind.”

Chapter
Four

Adjusting

I heard Diana rush around to the bedroom
doorway, I heard her flick a switch, then rush to my side,
announcing, “I just turned on the bedroom lights, can you see
better now?” I could hear the concern in her voice as I felt the
bed change as she sat down next to me. Her voice vibrated with so
much concern I was tempted to lie and say, “Yes, that’s better.” or
perhaps, “Oh, OK. My eyesight was just slow to wake up.”

Sadly, I went with the truth, “No. all I see
is grayness. Di, I’m totally blind. My eyesight is gone.”

“Now wait, you have had periods of fatigue
that weakened your eyesight so you couldn’t see. Could this be what
is happening?”

“I wish. No. During those times I still had
light perception. Now I am not seeing anything but
grayness–-nothing.” Flashing back to a similar visual experience, I
added, “Di, remember when Johns Hopkins gave me color tests and the
light grey was coming up more frequently?”

“Yes, a little.”

“When the color gray started coming up more
often during the color test, I asked why and was told, ‘When you
are seeing gray, what you are not seeing is the true color that is
there. You are losing color perspective in the lighter color range.
This is very common in people with RP.’ Well Di, that grey is all I
am seeing now. ”

“I’ll take the day off. We’ll call your eye
doctor and see what we can do. I’ll run you up to John Hopkins, if
that’s what it takes.” A frantic need to help was clogging her
thoughts, as noted by the comment on driving me to John Hopkins.
She hated city driving, any city, including Baltimore.