Linda LeCuyer has faced several difficult experiences, and some of them were stacked right on top of each other. In her 50s, Linda went through breast cancer treatment and lost her mother and another close relative, all in the span of six months. She almost lost her son, too.
That’s a lot of grief to face in a short period of time—but more was to come. Linda was already experiencing vision loss due to retinitis pigmentosa, then her cancer treatments accelerated that loss quite a bit.
“I remember saying to my husband, ‘There's something wrong with my computer,’” she says, because she noticed that the image on the screen looked all wrong. But when her husband told her, "It's not the screen. It's your vision," she knew she needed to look for help.
Linda lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, so she reached out to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. They connected her with independent living counselors, and she took a number of classes, including technology, cooking, and white cane skills. “That helped me tremendously,” Linda says, “because I was spiraling at that point.”
As Linda looks back, she remembers thinking, “I have to do everything different now. How am I supposed to do this?” But through her classes, she discovered, “It wasn't that I couldn't do it, it was that I didn't know how.”
Now, at 65, Linda feels much more positive. “I always say, I can do everything you can do. I just do it differently,” she says. And she shares that attitude with others.
Linda got so much from her classes, she volunteered to help teach them to others. “What helped me,” she says, “was giving back and helping other people that were going through the same thing I was going through. That's very fulfilling.”
And she brings that attitude to Hadley, too. She shared some of her journey with vision loss in an Insights & Sound Bites podcast. And as a member of the Peer to Peer Program, Linda has an opportunity to both give and receive. With her peer partner, she says, “We'll make notes all week, and then we'll talk to each other and compare notes. Well, what's going on? How did you deal with this?” She also notes, “It's helped me; it's helped her.”
Over time, Linda has found that her eyesight is still changing, which calls for ongoing adjustment. “My field of vision has gotten more narrow,” she says, and she can find herself bumping into a wall or a column, even in her own home. “It's like, wait, who moved the door?” she jokes.
But “I just try to stay positive,” she says. She also finds that exercise, yoga, and meditation help—along with her faith. And she’s always willing to try something new. “You just have to reinvent yourself,” Linda says. “And that's what I'm trying to do.”