My name is Michele Clock and I'm from New Hampshire. My daughter's 13, she was born by emergency C-section, and she was diagnosed with periventricular leukomalacia at birth, which is a brain injury, which resulted in cerebral palsy, and some other medical conditions, among which is a visual challenge of her own. We're learning, at Hadley, things like the advocacy class, I will learn that, I taught her that. Which was just amazing because in 7th grade, for the first time, she was learning and understanding math. And that was completely because she was doing math without relying on her faulty visual tracking. Some of the technology and listening to the iFocus webinars on the Hadley website she'll listen to them too because she's a technology user and that's how she gets around. I took her to Boston and she's learning a lot of the going places and learning how to navigate and get around safely.
And it's just amazing, and it just means the world to me that the knowledge that I'm gaining I can pass along to her. All the life skills that I learned that just changed my world. Learning how to cut, my daughter helping me, to cut my daughters finger nails safely. Self defense and visual impairment, I felt that I had to always live with somebody, because I felt I couldn't live alone with a visual impairment and a daughter and keeping myself and my daughter safe and being able to do that and just having that basic foundation of safety had changed my world and a lot of people I think might take that for granted.
I can never stop saying thank you for that because it just, I feel alive. Because you can't live if you don't feel safe. Hadley is just so, it's such a magical place because they're just here to help you, in any way they can, to follow your dreams.