Tina Lowe was living in Spain when she started to lose her sight, in 1993. Now completely blind, she tells Róisín Ingle how she has rebuilt her life.
When Tina Lowe lived in Spain she met the same young woman in the same spot, at the same time, every day on the way to work. The woman was blind. She carried a white cane. Every morning the two strangers stood waiting for the lights to change at a pedestrian crossing. "I was almost afraid of her. I was afraid to touch her arm or help her across the road. Her blindness made me nervous," says Lowe, sitting in her home in Shankill, Co Dublin. "I could just about manage to tell her that the lights had changed to green. She would say thank you and just glide across the road, and I would watch totally amazed by how she was able to get around."
She is telling this story to illustrate the way some of us act when we are around blind people. Lowe has countless anecdotes about bizarre behaviour and irrational comments directed to the unseeing by the seeing community.
The 39-year-old Dubliner is now herself blind. She was still living in Spain when she started to lose her sight, in February 1993. She endured a few weeks of piercing headaches, blurred vision and dizzy spells until she went to a doctor and learned that she had a virus in her skull. The virus had led to fluid on the brain, and her optic nerves were damaged, causing the impaired vision. She returned home to Dublin for treatment and in August underwent brain surgery. Although she recovered well from the other debilitating physical effects of the virus, her sight, except for a slight ability to see colours in her left eye, is now completely gone.
"I remember thinking, how can I have lost my sight in such a stupid way? There was nothing wrong with my eyes. It was the nerves that were damaged. It happens to lots of people, but I didn't realise that at the time," she says.
After the shock of surgery, her hair began falling out in clumps. "I was very calm, very practical about it," she says of her reaction to the blindness. "I wanted to get out of here, out of this world. I wanted to commit suicide. I had no sight, no house, my hair was falling out, I had no job, no money, no life in Spain any more. I told one of the nurses how I felt and I was put on suicide watch. But I was just being very rational about the fact that my life, my life as I knew it, was over."
The situation was made even more traumatic by the fact that a serious relationship with the man she was living with in Spain at the time of her illness had fallen apart. "He just completely bottled it," she says. "He couldn't relate to me as a blind person. I feel now that I had a lucky escape, but at the time it really hurt." She cried for two weeks and was in denial about her blindness. "When a social worker came to the house with a cane, I told her where she could stick it," she remembers.
Gradually, though, she began to build a new life. On a National Council for the Blind of Ireland course, she met others who were struggling as they lost their sight. She went on to do a music-business course where she met a lot of "groovy, open accepting people. It was so liberating". She joined a samba band and drummed in processions and parades for four years. "I would tie my elbow to somebody else and dance along with nobody ever knowing I couldn't see," she says.
She did her Leaving Cert again, gaining 390 points, and went to study arts and languages at UCD, where she was awarded a scholarship and graduated with a 2:1. Now she works for Ahead, an organisation that helps graduates with disabilities secure jobs. She has been skiing twice and still goes to Spain every year for a holiday.
"In Ireland you are treated like an alien from Planet Blind by the majority of people. In Spain they don't care if you are blind or have no legs, they will say hello and have no problem approaching you," she says. "At home they are like I was before: hesitant and afraid of your disability. There is no rational reason, no logic behind people treating blind people differently, but they do it all the time. It was worse before I got the guide dog. People like dogs, so they are more likely to act normally around you." She says the dog changed her life even though she was afraid of dogs back when she could see.
"Some people glide through life with a cane and are really graceful, but my gait had changed, I had put on weight from all the steroids and my walking was restricted. Friends called me 'the shuffler' and begged me to get a dog," she laughs. Blake has been with her four years, as necessary to her life as the talking computer in her study. He is a gentle giant, a black Labrador that enables her to leave her house, go to work and live a more active life than she had when she used a cane.
Unfortunately, it appears many restaurateurs, taxi drivers and shop owners in this country are still unaware of legislation that means they must admit guide dogs. She and Blake were recently told that no dogs were allowed in restaurants in the Dublin suburbs of Dalkey and Dún Laoghaire. "I was with my boss in Dalkey when the waiter told us we couldn't come in with a dog. She was horrified. I said 'welcome to Ireland'," says Lowe.
"The best thing that ever came out of blindness is guide dogs. I don't know if people are really aware of what they do for people like me. I am hoping to change that."
Tina Lowe will hike the Inca Trail in Peru with 39 other volunteers, four of them blind, to raise funds for Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind next September. On Friday she is hosting a table quiz in Dún Laoghaire. It's fully booked, but donations - cash or spot prizes - are welcome. Call Tina on 087-2872233