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Video title: A vision loss adventure (Part 2)

Video duration: 6:16

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Video transcript

[Music playing]

Julie: Often children ask me, what can I see? Is it all black? And I say no it's all white. So it's like looking through a foggy bathroom mirror… with the lights out… So it's sort of white in the back and black behind it's quite hard to describe.

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Julie Woods is an inspirational speaker and life coach from Dunedin.

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Julie: I went into a hardware shop one day… with my father and the man behind the counter turned to his wife and said, here's that blind girl I was talking… to you about, and I thought hmm, I'm not sure if I like that, and I came away from that thinking oh well that's what people are going to call me and it kept hap’ting… happening more and more often so I decided to brand myself as That Blind Woman. Rather than be annoyed by it I thought I'd embrace it.

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Julie: So I guess if we start at the very beginning I was born totally sighted in 1966. And then when I was 18 years of age I developed a condition called Stargardts disease, which is… a condition that affects the macula, the central vision. I had trouble reading print and, reading fine print, reading signs on the road, and recognising people at a distance, so that was my… first… ah, dip into partial sight, and then that really remained fairly stable until… 1997 at the age of 31 I became legally blind due to a condition-ah called inflammation of the retina, which affected the back of my eye, and I was married, ah-with my two boys, Zachary aged three and Sebastian aged one. And that's when life really began to change.

Julie: I noticed the vinyl in our bathroom was shimmering, and that shimmer went to a blob, and to a haze, and it spread to my right eye so within three months I lost most of my remaining vision and all I could see was high contrasting shapes and moving shadows. [Music starts playing at background level] And since then in 2008 I lost my remaining vision and I'm now totally blind.

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I was out walking one day, actually I stopped at the lights at the Captain Cook Tavern and I began to cross the road there, and I couldn't see the other side, um, which with my legal blindness I could follow the contrast in the footpaths and any markings on the road, and I… just… couldn't... and I remember someone offering to help me and I had trouble getting back to work, and just almost instantly there was… this dip in sight that left me totally blind.

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Julie: I've found blindness to be life changing. [Music fades out] In fact I wrote a seven-word story about my vision loss adventure. Sighted, partially sighted, blind. Happy, sad, happy… And what I mean by that was when I was partially sighted I had no support. When I had a second opinion from an ophthalmologist, my mother asked the ophthalmologist, what support services are available for Julie? And he turned to her and said, what do you want support services for? So that of course threw me into a no man’s land. I didn't belong in the sighted world, and I didn't belong in the blind world. I belonged nowhere. So, ironically it wasn't until I went blind that it moved me towards a group of people who are now like me. So I met blind people who were reading with their fingers, and reading with their ears. I met a blind woman who used a chainsaw. I met a blind man who mowed his lawn with one shoe on, and one shoe off. So I was meeting other blind people who were doing the things that I thought I couldn't, and for me I found that very liberating. So I was now free to be who I wanted to be, and I had the support to be who I wanted to be, and that has really made me really happy.

[Music playing]

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Julie: The boys were three and one when I went blind. So for them, they just thought that mums were blind and dads could see, and it wasn't until my oldest son Zachary went to school and he said to me, mum, why is it that other mums can see? And I said well, other mums can see, Zach, it's just your mum that's blind. And that kind of struck me that the way they saw their childhood was normal to them. And I always… wished and dreamed that they would grow up as human beings that would be more aware of other people's needs than just their own, and apart from their teenage years, ha-they're now 25 and 23, I would like to say that that is how they have ended up.

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Julie: You know, to be able to see the world through someone else's lens is, is something that… we as people with disabilities can give to the greater world. So I mean I see that as our greatest asset, but of course we have to get people who don't have disabilities to see that as a great thing as well. But I'm ah-I’m ah, an optimist and I hope that the world will… is beginning to see the world in different ways and that diversity is becoming a new way of being, and not just through disability but through race, through sexuality, through religion, through all the different, um, ways that we can exist in the world, so I'm hopeful that the world will be a better place for people with disabilities, in the future.

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Last updated on Thursday, 30 May 2019

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