The “countdown to retirement” timer was already well in place on Marie’s phone when things went a bit off plan. Marie Woodcox lives in the greater Detroit area and worked for years as an Information Technology manager for a staffing company.
One morning in 2012, she woke up to find most of the vision gone from one eye. She was diagnosed with Non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION). This condition is sometimes called an “eye stroke.” The optic nerve is damaged due to a lack of blood supply. It typically happens overnight without warning.
Doctors told her that 20% of the time the other eye will be affected as well. Marie took that as good news. She had an 80% chance that the impairment would be confined to just one eye. She continued to work and drive. “It was not a huge inconvenience,” Marie recalls.
Then, 4 ½ years later, the vision in her other eye became blurry. She drove to the doctor’s office to get it checked out. But when she learned that NAION had now affected her other eye too, she did not drive home … or ever since.
“It was tough. Giving up driving. This was the car that I bought to take me into retirement. I got all the fancy stuff on it and wanted to drive it until the wheels fell off. I used to go out and sit in that car and just cry. I allowed myself to cry quite a bit the first couple months.”
Adjusting to life with permanent vision loss took time, effort and the realization that life was still worth living. “I got up one morning and the sun was shining, and the sky was blue, and the grass green, and I could still see all this. I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to die.’ And once I made that decision, I knew what I had to do. I had to get off the couch and start testing my limits.”
It started with an otherwise mundane task, dumping a new bag of cat food into a container. It was a big deal for Marie to accomplish that. And it was the first of many steps she has taken to adjust to living with diminished sight. “I just do one thing at a time and keep testing limits and moving forward.”
Marie’s brother did some research and found a local agency to help her. She was amazed when the worker who came into her home told her that she could do anything a sighted person could do with her iPhone. “With that, she had my immediate attention,” Marie notes.
Given her career in IT, it should come as no surprise that Marie has found technology to be extremely useful in helping her adjust. “With any kind of tech tool that’s been recommended to me, I will play around with it until I find out if it’s going to be useful or not. I used to knit and bought every single gadget for knitting, same thing for calligraphy. I’ve been that kind of gadget person my whole life. So now, I pour my concentration into technology that will help me live with vision loss. It’s normalized things for me,” Marie says.
“It’s still massively inconvenient not to be able to just go out and get in the car and go someplace. I’m still grieving that part of my life. But you know when I decided that I didn’t want to die, I also remember thinking I must be the only blind person in Michigan. That, of course, is absolutely not true. I now know a whole new community. I’ve allowed myself to become more involved in the blindness community and there are great people I meet every single day.”