How to help visually impaired people in everyday life!

The blind and visually impaired can be sure they will always experience difficulties of one form or another, and although most people try to be sensitive to issues that are obvious difficulties, many family and friends (for one reason or another) aren’t aware of some of the more awkward situations, and consequently miss out on good opportunities to help out. It’s my hope here that after reading about my own vision related difficulties, you will be more aware of these and other problems, and be better able to find ways to help if you know someone in this type of situation.

To begin with, in a perfect world there would be no such things as leggos, jacks or little metal cars. But this is not a perfect world and sometimes I end up either screaming and jumping up and down on one foot while holding the other, or writhing in pain on the floor after stepping on such God forsaken items. Here, loved ones could be on the look-out for their impaired’s feet and try to keep these booby traps picked up.

Some foot dangers can’t be avoided though, and because of their relative immovability, they present a stubbing danger of the highest caliber. Items such as coffee table legs, dresser legs, kitchen table legs, door ways and even stairs can leave a visually impaired person either screaming bloody murder, or for the tougher visually impaired person, unable to exhale while turning five shades of red. Have you ever stubbed your pinkie toe? Hurts, doesn’t it?

Well helping your loved one avoid these painful ‘stubbings’ could be as easy as encouraging your blind loved one to either slow down, or put something on his/her feet. If, however your loved one seems to ignore your advice, it is preferable to avoid badgering and calmly state, “You’ve been warned.”

In my home, the kitchen is a great place for my family to assist me in avoiding difficulties. I say this because I spend a lot of time in there and have experienced situations that could have been avoided with minimal effort. For one, I have an extremely hard time detecting glasses of water or milk that are left sitting on the counter, and chances are that if one is left there, that some way, somehow, I’m going to knock it over. The simple solution in this instance is not to leave glasses, empty or otherwise, sitting out in the open.

When out on the town, as well as in the kitchen, something else that the blind might avoid with the help of loved ones is a trauma associated with eating. I say this because when eating meat, sometimes I think I’m going to bite into a nice meaty, juicy and tender piece of steak only to find that it’s a nasty hunk of fat, or I just about break my teeth on a hunk of bone. All that need be done to help your impaired loved one avoid these discomforts is let them know if you see either of these about to be placed in the mouth.

One of the most important things I think you can do for your visually impaired or blind friend or relative is to give the person a good-nonjudgmental-look-over before going out in public. Think about it, how would you feel if you couldn’t see for yourself, and someone told you that you had spaghetti sauce on your neck or fore head, told you your shirt was on in-side-out, or that you had a “huge honkin’ booger hangin’ out” after allowing you to walk around like that all day?

I know when it happened to me, I was glad to finally find out, but I was also mortified that a stranger had to tell me.

If your visually impaired loved one begins accusing people of stealing his belongings, the best thing you loved ones can do is relax. It may be that he has figured out something that I have learned. It seems that when I can’t find something of mine, I amazingly find it seconds after wrongfully accusing someone of taking it! The way I deal with this problem is to skip the searching and I go directly to accusing; claiming with an angry voice that some one stole my what ever.

Something unusual that would make me happy is if my loved ones would do me the favor of keeping the toilet lid in the up position. I can’t tell you how many unexpected knee and thigh showers I’d given myself before learning that just because the toilet seat lid looks up (to me), it might really be down. Lazily, though I should always check the lid position, I hardly ever do.

Another difficulty I have in the bathroom is when people leave just a little tissue paper in the commode. When I go #1, I use my sense of hearing to find and stay on target, and when there is tissue paper in there, it muffles the sound making me unsure of my aim. In this situation, I have to aim by using the force, and shamefully,, I don’t think this is always accurate. To solve this problem, loved ones could simply flush the toilet when they are through. Yes I know sitting down would also alleviate this problem, but being a hard-headed guy, I simply don’t always take the time to do that.

Another issue worthy of discussion is my cat that, like other living things, eats. Well, all last week every time I went to pour the cat food into the dish, as I tipped the bag back up to close it, about 15 or 20 pieces of cat food would fall and scatter on the floor.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why that was happening. I thought somehow food was getting hung up at the mouth of the bag and dropping to the floor as I rolled its top closed. Determined not to be messy, one evening, I was extra, extra careful and it happened again! So I felt around the bag and discovered a small tear in the bottom of it, undoubtedly cause by a cat claw.

If you are wondering why this is such a problem, then you probably never stepped on a single piece of hard cat food before. Let me tell you it sticks to the bottom of your foot. So when you think you flicked it off you step away to painfully find that it’s still there! That said, if there is a hole torn in your bag of cat (or dog) food, please, for the love of God and your blind loved one, tape it closed!

As I’ve tried to illustrate, some of the things that blind people do or experience can seem quite comical. That said, sometimes an accumulation of seemingly silly harmless and comical situations can sadly become traumatic and have a real negative effect on the blind persons self esteem and confidence, especially if the surrounding loved ones aren’t sensitive to this possibility.

Imagine if you did all of the following: Over fill glasses of milk or water, then as you take it from the counter, slosh it all over, attempt to pour coffee into an up-side-down coffee cup, or miss the cup and instead pour coffee onto your lap, all of which results in a huge embarrassing mess.

Surrounded by sensitive people, these are nothing more than funny little inconveniences. But if, as stated above, the impaired person is surrounded by people who get angry and judgmental every time an accident occurs, the visually impaired person could decide to internalize difficulties figuring that it’s easier for everyone involved to simply withdraw (and stop interacting) than it is to continue causing more problems. That said, there are no problems that can’t be conquered when loved ones care enough to help.