What if You Were Losing Your Eyesight?
When your hobbies are in the crafting world, eyesight is very precious. I have a dear friend who is a wonderful lace knitter, sock knitter, and crocheter who is slowly losing her eyesight to glaucoma. She now only sees light and dark and that is rapidly diminishing so before long she will be completely blind. Sitting beside her at knit group has been a great lesson in the courage and strength of a determined knitter. She refuses to knit only garter stitch squares for the rest of her life so she comes to knit group with a hat she is knitting in the round. All is going fairly well until she drops a stitch and can’t find it to pick it up, or she comes to the decreases and loses count. Well, we have solved the problem of losing count by making stitch markers with different dips to she can count each decrease. Dropped stitches she has trained her husband to find so she can get them back on the needle but she is still trying to learn to find them by herself and then repair them alone.
If you wonder just how difficult this would be, here is an exercise for you to try.
Try blindfolding yourself and knit three or four rows then look at what you have created. With luck, you have a piece without holes, no split stitches, no extra yarn overs - in other-words - a perfect piece. More likely you have dropped stitches, split stitches, have extra holes, etc. Now blindfold yourself again and try to correct your mistakes by using only your fingers to find them, then repair them by touch alone. Not an easy task.
Today I wrote out the pattern into full text for a crocheted edging so she can have her husband read it aloud and she can type it into her braille writer - yes she is learning to use a braille writer so she can have patterns and not have to memorize all of them. Since her husband doesn’t knit or crochet, he doesn’t know the abbreviations or the importance of the punctuation and asterisks to the pattern sequence. Now he can read it like a book and she can put in the abbreviations where she wants them.
My friend also has learned to walk with a white cane, is learning how to eat neatly so she can go to restaurants and enjoy herself. (A dining scarf helps her by protecting her clothing, so if she spills it isn’t so obvious.) Other daily living tasks that she is learning is how to identify money, how to coordinate her wardrobe, how to put on makeup, how to move around her home without tripping, etc, etc. These are all daunting tasks for anyone but when you reach your 70s your ability to learn slows down a little so all of this becomes even more difficult.
My reason for writing this is to honor all the hard work that my friend has put into remaining a functioning member of society and to retain some of her knitting and crocheting abilities since she loves playing with yarn so much. May others who are facing similar diagnosis draw inspiration and courage from my friend’s struggles.