Charles Mossop – CANADA
It was not for another two years that I realized that small incident with falling snow heralded the onset of my sight disability. In 1964 I was told I had macular degeneration, and two years after that the diagnosis was refined to Stargartd's Macular Dystrophy: a condition that results in the loss of central vision almost identical to the effects of age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Stargartd's usually appears in early life, is a genetically based inherited condition and is very rare. There are only about three thousand Stargartd's patients in Canada.
PHOTOGRAPH OF
CHARLES MOSSOP
By the time the diagnosis was finally made, I had lost enough of my central vision that I was no longer able to drive and was having trouble reading. I was half-way through my second year of university, and I felt as if my future, if not my life had been taken away. My parents were in another country, and although I had other family members relatively close, I did not see them often and they were unable to offer much support. I felt confused, afraid and utterly alone.
My ophthalmologist recommended that I register with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB), and although I was mortally afraid of the word blind, I eventually went and saw the people at the Vancouver CNIB office. Things improved markedly. I no longer felt so isolated, and I found that I had a new network of friends to whom I could turn for help, support and advice. My ophthalmologist had advised me to leave university and seek training more appropriate to the sight he said I would have - he estimated that within ten years I would be unable to do any of what he called normal work - but my CNIB contacts rejected that idea altogether and strongly encouraged me to stay at university. That proved to be the best advice I was ever given. I did stay, and after a total of six years I left with a Bachelor's and Master's degree in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Throughout my post-secondary studies my sight had continued to deteriorate, but had stabilized by the time I left graduate school. I sought and found employment in the newly emerging community college system and obtained a teaching position in 1970.
That position developed into a thirty-year career in post-secondary education which culminated in a management position that I occupied for seventeen years. Throughout my career, my sight went through periods of deterioration separated by periods of relative stability, but it seemed that as my sight became increasingly restricted, my horizons of activity and work became ever wider. My job called for me to travel extensively throughout the world, and particularly in Asia, and I developed ways and means of coping with the requirements of international travel. I was also required to do an increasing amount of public speaking and I worked out ways of preparing for those occasions through a system I devised of highly condensed speaking notes which I wrote or printed out in large, bold letters.
Whenever a new assistive device appeared I turned for help to CNIB and learned how to make best use of the sight I had left through the use of adaptive technology. Thus, I began to use video magnifiers (Closed Circuit Television, or CCTV) when they became available, and when screen magnification software came onto the market, I began to use a computer. The early screen magnifying programmes were not fully compatible with the old main frame computing that we used at the college at that time, but I used it notwithstanding and then when the age of the personal computer dawned I acquired new software and at that point the full benefit of the computer became available to me. When I retired from the college, which has now become a university, I established a part time consulting business, and the computer became the means by which I carried on that work. ZoomText is the screen magnifying software I use , and when I first installed it in 1995 I set it for 2x magnification for things like email and routine documents. I'm up to 6 or even 8 power now, . but I continue to do whatever I need to do, be it writing, Internet research or anything else. Such work obviously takes me a good deal longer than it would take a fully sighted person, but I don't find that a deterrent.
And speaking of writing, I published many articles and papers when I was at the college, but always promised myself I would try my hand at fiction when I had a little more spare time. I always loved reading good historical fiction and went from normal print to large print and then to audiobooks as my sight deteriorated over the years. I began writing fiction when I retired and have now developed a modest career as a writer of short mystery stories, and in July of 2007 my first novel was published.
After retirement I became a leadership volunteer with CNIB, and that has provided me with a marvellous opportunity to work with other people who are living with vision loss and to apply whatever skills I have in advocacy, public speaking and communications to assisting CNIB in bringing greater independence to its clients. CNIB did much for me over the years, and I am grateful for the chance to repay at least some of the debt.
For me, the most significant realization is that while I can't help what's happened to my sight, I am responsible for my vision: that is my vision of the world and my place in it, my vision of myself as a person and productive member of society. I am not my disability. It does not define me. I define who I am through my vision of myself. Limited sight does not have to lead to limited vision, and I have always found it invaluable to keep sight and vision clearly separated in my mind. No matter how limited our sight, our vision can be rich with infinite possibilities. I was told I would not be able to work for more that about ten years, but forty-four years later, I'm still going!
