January 31, 2025 • 12 mins
Dr. Tyler speaks to entrepreneurs Krystle Allen and Naquela Wright-Prevo, who are both blind, and Lisa Durden who is producing a documentary feature about these two amazing women. Krystle and Naquela share their stories about how medical malpractice led to their unique blindness issues, and how both have thrived in their family lives and careers. Lisa Durden tells us how her fascination with these two women led to a documentary called 'Blind Divas', currently in production.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
There is a segment in Black society many of us
do not see. Yet they see us, but not in
the traditional way.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
So I am completely blind.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Blind, black and fabulous. We speak with women with vision
even though they cannot see. They are blind divas and
they do it all in black Land and now, as
a Brown person, you just feel so invisible where we're from.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Brothers and sisters are welcome you to this joyful and.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Day we celebrate freedom.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Where we are.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
I know someone heard something and where we're going. We
the people means all the people.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
The Black Information Network presents Blackland with your host, Vanessa Tyler.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
I went blind in twenty ten from a condition called
pseudo to Mercury Bree.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Meet Nicollo, write Prevo. She told you at the beginning
she is completely blind, was not born that way. How
she became blind is another story. Hear that later. But
she became blind at age fifteen. Oddly, she never saw
many blind people before.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
I literally fooled one blind person my whole life at
that time, and he was crossed in the street.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Eventually she did meet other blind people, one in particular,
Crystal Allen. They bonded like sisters.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
I am legally blind and me and Nicola. We actually
are the first to meet each other with our condition,
because we were both teenagers when we were diagnosed and
began using our eyes sight.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
The two black women started the nonprofit Eyes Like Mine.
That was ten years ago. Since then, they became part
of this unseen world. They created their own community of
mostly black women who are fierce and fabulous, so much
so somebody has to do their story how they navigate
the world, White Cane and All. Somebody did, documentary producer
(02:02):
Lisa Durton. She met Crystal first at an event in Newark,
New Jersey, where Lisa and Crystal were both being honored
for their community involvement.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
I saw her walking toward me with a cane, and
people kind of know in our society, we're kind of
used to people with cane, so we know, oh, that's
a blind person, so that's a common thing. So she
walked into me and said, oh, I heard them read
your bio and it seems like you do a lot
of great things and you're always out in the battle.
Would love to She didn't even say why, she just said,
(02:33):
I'd love for us to get together, just to learn
more about each other. She said, can you text me
nothingness said, you know, I have to have my insul voice.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
So when she said can you text me?
Speaker 3 (02:45):
This is only in twenty seventeen, I was thinking, bitch,
ain't you blind?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Lisa's funny, Yes she was blind, but what blew Lisa
away was how Crystal moves, not just getting around, but
make it all happened with that black girl attitude. So
they connected.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Boom.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
She got back to me quickly. I'm thinking okay. So
we got together and I hop in Nork and we started.
We had a little late lunch and when we were talking,
she came in there walking in the room with the cane.
She came by herself with nobody escorting herm thinking she's
by herself, how does.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
She get here? They ordered their lunch.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
So as we started talking, her phone began to talk.
We all have that technology, we just don't think to
use it. You have another text and it reads a
text to her out loud, and think, oh, that's how
she saw my text.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
It tells her.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
So I'm thinking, wow, I'm thinking to myself not saying
this is interesting. So she wanted to meet with me,
for me to for her to invite me to be
the EMC of the one of their anchor events called
the Miss Blind deeve I Empowerment pageant, because she knows
my TV personality, I said, oh, yeah, absolutely. So that's
how we initially met by me being asked to MC
(03:57):
their big event, and then a second big event called
Dance at the Blind. So from there I would go
to rehearsals, we'd hang out, and it.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Was ie opening. Lisa also met Nicuela again. She was
in awe how Nicuela did her thing.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
So we went into Dunkin Donuts, and I was so
used to being around them, I just I ordered my
stuff and stepped aside. She walked up and ordered her
her coffee, and then she took money of her person paid.
Now I had been with them about two years ago
at that time, but I had never seen her purchase
anything in the store. So what I got, I said,
I said, how did you know how much money you had?
So I still asked asked questions a little bit at
that time. She said, Oh, I put my money in
(04:32):
particular order they figure it out.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
People need to see this, which is how the documentary
Blind Divas was born.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
When I began this film and trying to make people
aware because all of my documentaries seemed to end up,
you know activism type of documentaries speaking about the underserved
communities or you know, amplifying voices that are not heard often.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
And these women have a lot to say and show.
So how they became blind again, both were not blind
at birth. Naquella rite Prevo is now thirty and diagnosed
with pseudo tumor cerebris, which ends in total blindness.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
So I am completely blind. It actually thurred on from
birth control I was taken at the time.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Did you say as a result of birth control pills. Yes,
and that's a side effect. I've never even heard of
that before.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
So it can be a side effect in some women.
It is a class action suit going on because of that.
It's not even on a lone and label. At the
time when I went blind, it was very rare. And
now pseudo tumor cerebris is becoming more common.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
As a result of birth control pills.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
As a result of malpractice period, because there's a bunch
of different medications and different ingredients and medication that can
cause an overdose that can cause pseudo tumor in somebody.
It's more common in women, it's more common in women
who are overweight. It can happen if you have any
(06:11):
type of head trauma. It's what pseudo tumor is. It's
a false tumor. So my body made too much spinal fluid.
It's final fluids with your brain sus sense, so it
don't knock against your skull, and that access fluid acted
as if it was a tumor and basically put too
much pressure on my octo nerves. And yeah, it's stemmed
(06:31):
from the birth control I was taken at the time.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
And Crystal Allen, who is now forty years old, again
her blindness stemmed from a medical issue.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
I was sixteen and mine started through a medical malpractice
from a dermatologist who was treating me for ex amount.
I've had as and that since I was five, but
it was very severe, even to the plane where for
a whole entire week when I was in third grade,
I can now because the joints in my legs locked
(07:05):
because my skin became infected from the invitation. So my
family on my mom's side are from Honduras, Central America,
and they would always bring a lot of remedies to
kind of treat my skin naturally. But that wasn't working,
and my cousin she had eggs and as well. She
lived in New York and she was seeing those dermatologists
(07:27):
who actually happened to be named Michael Jackson, and she
found that she was receiving great results. So she recommended
him to my grandmother and we started seeing him, and
it was great results. I was having clear skin, my
skin wasn't as irritable. I was wearing shorts for the
(07:49):
first time at sixteen with concidence. But within that year
of treatment from the dermatologists, I started having really really
bad headaches all day and night, vomiting clear fluid, being
unbalanced when walking. And my vision wasn't yet affected. But
I noticed that some of my peers and even some
(08:11):
doctors sometimes when they would look in my eyes, they
would say wow. And I'd be like, what are you
guys saying wow at? And it was that my eyes
looked like they were bulging in a more extreme way,
and ultimately I wound up going to an eye doctor.
The eye doctor just told me I needed to get
fitted for prescription eyewear because my eyes seemed inflamed, meaning swollen,
(08:36):
and I was just gonna be needing.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
That in reality what she had a pair of prescription
eyeglasses could not fix.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
But I noticed I wasn't receiving any relief, and I
came back to the same eye clinic at the hospital
and there was a different optometrist there who did more
of a thorough examination of me, and by the end
of the visit he declared that I had suittle turm
of cerebreath.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Both women with the same diagnosis.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
I am permanently legally blind. And the reason for me
saying permanently is that my I think nerves are too
severely damaged for me to be able to use prescription
I wear, and there's no procedure that can restore my
vision currently because of the damage from the aptic nerve trauma.
(09:27):
The way it was determined that I developed this pseudo
tumor because of the medication I was on from the
dermatologist the neurologist who was trying to figure out the
route on why I developed this. He told me that
when he evaluated my prescription history, there were seven out
(09:47):
of the twenty five medications prescribed by the dermatologists that
contain tetracycling. And you know tetracycling when it's in certain medications,
especially if it's in more than one, and depending on
what it's being prescribed for, your body can react with
it as an older dose. And so that's what ultimately
(10:07):
happened with me.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Devastating. But these women have a saying they lost their
sight but not their vision, and what they saw was
a full life starring them.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
I had to learn how to cook, clean though, and
used computer in a different way, so it was different.
But I just had to grin and bearry because that
was my life. And I never was the one to
sit down and just take just let life happen.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
I took life by the balls. Documentarian Lisa Durden saw
it too.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
When I saw this young lady go in the kitchen.
She walks in the kitchen, she's blind, opens the cabinet.
I'm like, this is a couple of years ago. I'm like,
she's in the house alone. She takes out a can
of string beings, opens the can, she gets the pot,
turns on the stoveness and said, woosh.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
I saw the flames.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
I said, she go to burn the house down, and
she makes the right I had never seen. Even though
I didn't know them that long, at this time, I
maybe knew them about two years by this time, and
I'm like, they can cook in the kitchen.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Their lives are busy. In fact, Naquela is a wife
and mother. In this clip from the documentary, she is
giving her a drible little daughter a bath.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Do you want to say a bath now? Yeah? Oh?
Speaker 4 (11:24):
Let go. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
I've come up.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
It's not always easy. When Nicola had her first child
at that time as a single mother, hospital officials tried
to stop her from bringing her baby home.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I was in a hospital and there asking me, well,
food's going to be home with you? Who's do you
live with? Anybody?
Speaker 4 (11:48):
Like?
Speaker 2 (11:49):
They wasn't gonna let me go home with my son
if my father wasn't with me to take me home.
If I didn't have my father did not come to
take me home with my son, And they wasn't gonna
let me go home with my son. They was gonna
let me go, but my son was gonna stack.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
When we come back here, what dating is like for
these blind divas, How Naquela met her husband who is
fully cited. Plus their message and warning to the Black
community about our eyesight and how you can make sure
to see the eye opening documentary Blind Divas that's up
next on black Land
There is a segment in Black society many of us
do not see. Yet they see us, but not in
the traditional way.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
So I am completely blind.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Blind, black and fabulous. We speak with women with vision
even though they cannot see. They are blind divas and
they do it all in black Land and now, as
a Brown person, you just feel so invisible where we're from.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Brothers and sisters are welcome you to this joyful and.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Day we celebrate freedom.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Where we are.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
I know someone heard something and where we're going. We
the people means all the people.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
The Black Information Network presents Blackland with your host, Vanessa Tyler.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
I went blind in twenty ten from a condition called
pseudo to Mercury Bree.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Meet Nicollo, write Prevo. She told you at the beginning
she is completely blind, was not born that way. How
she became blind is another story. Hear that later. But
she became blind at age fifteen. Oddly, she never saw
many blind people before.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
I literally fooled one blind person my whole life at
that time, and he was crossed in the street.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Eventually she did meet other blind people, one in particular,
Crystal Allen. They bonded like sisters.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
I am legally blind and me and Nicola. We actually
are the first to meet each other with our condition,
because we were both teenagers when we were diagnosed and
began using our eyes sight.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
The two black women started the nonprofit Eyes Like Mine.
That was ten years ago. Since then, they became part
of this unseen world. They created their own community of
mostly black women who are fierce and fabulous, so much
so somebody has to do their story how they navigate
the world, White Cane and All. Somebody did, documentary producer
(02:02):
Lisa Durton. She met Crystal first at an event in Newark,
New Jersey, where Lisa and Crystal were both being honored
for their community involvement.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
I saw her walking toward me with a cane, and
people kind of know in our society, we're kind of
used to people with cane, so we know, oh, that's
a blind person, so that's a common thing. So she
walked into me and said, oh, I heard them read
your bio and it seems like you do a lot
of great things and you're always out in the battle.
Would love to She didn't even say why, she just said,
(02:33):
I'd love for us to get together, just to learn
more about each other. She said, can you text me
nothingness said, you know, I have to have my insul voice.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
So when she said can you text me?
Speaker 3 (02:45):
This is only in twenty seventeen, I was thinking, bitch,
ain't you blind?
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Lisa's funny, Yes she was blind, but what blew Lisa
away was how Crystal moves, not just getting around, but
make it all happened with that black girl attitude. So
they connected.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Boom.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
She got back to me quickly. I'm thinking okay. So
we got together and I hop in Nork and we started.
We had a little late lunch and when we were talking,
she came in there walking in the room with the cane.
She came by herself with nobody escorting herm thinking she's
by herself, how does.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
She get here? They ordered their lunch.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
So as we started talking, her phone began to talk.
We all have that technology, we just don't think to
use it. You have another text and it reads a
text to her out loud, and think, oh, that's how
she saw my text.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
It tells her.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
So I'm thinking, wow, I'm thinking to myself not saying
this is interesting. So she wanted to meet with me,
for me to for her to invite me to be
the EMC of the one of their anchor events called
the Miss Blind deeve I Empowerment pageant, because she knows
my TV personality, I said, oh, yeah, absolutely. So that's
how we initially met by me being asked to MC
(03:57):
their big event, and then a second big event called
Dance at the Blind. So from there I would go
to rehearsals, we'd hang out, and it.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Was ie opening. Lisa also met Nicuela again. She was
in awe how Nicuela did her thing.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
So we went into Dunkin Donuts, and I was so
used to being around them, I just I ordered my
stuff and stepped aside. She walked up and ordered her
her coffee, and then she took money of her person paid.
Now I had been with them about two years ago
at that time, but I had never seen her purchase
anything in the store. So what I got, I said,
I said, how did you know how much money you had?
So I still asked asked questions a little bit at
that time. She said, Oh, I put my money in
(04:32):
particular order they figure it out.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
People need to see this, which is how the documentary
Blind Divas was born.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
When I began this film and trying to make people
aware because all of my documentaries seemed to end up,
you know activism type of documentaries speaking about the underserved
communities or you know, amplifying voices that are not heard often.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
And these women have a lot to say and show.
So how they became blind again, both were not blind
at birth. Naquella rite Prevo is now thirty and diagnosed
with pseudo tumor cerebris, which ends in total blindness.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
So I am completely blind. It actually thurred on from
birth control I was taken at the time.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Did you say as a result of birth control pills. Yes,
and that's a side effect. I've never even heard of
that before.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
So it can be a side effect in some women.
It is a class action suit going on because of that.
It's not even on a lone and label. At the
time when I went blind, it was very rare. And
now pseudo tumor cerebris is becoming more common.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
As a result of birth control pills.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
As a result of malpractice period, because there's a bunch
of different medications and different ingredients and medication that can
cause an overdose that can cause pseudo tumor in somebody.
It's more common in women, it's more common in women
who are overweight. It can happen if you have any
(06:11):
type of head trauma. It's what pseudo tumor is. It's
a false tumor. So my body made too much spinal fluid.
It's final fluids with your brain sus sense, so it
don't knock against your skull, and that access fluid acted
as if it was a tumor and basically put too
much pressure on my octo nerves. And yeah, it's stemmed
(06:31):
from the birth control I was taken at the time.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
And Crystal Allen, who is now forty years old, again
her blindness stemmed from a medical issue.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
I was sixteen and mine started through a medical malpractice
from a dermatologist who was treating me for ex amount.
I've had as and that since I was five, but
it was very severe, even to the plane where for
a whole entire week when I was in third grade,
I can now because the joints in my legs locked
(07:05):
because my skin became infected from the invitation. So my
family on my mom's side are from Honduras, Central America,
and they would always bring a lot of remedies to
kind of treat my skin naturally. But that wasn't working,
and my cousin she had eggs and as well. She
lived in New York and she was seeing those dermatologists
(07:27):
who actually happened to be named Michael Jackson, and she
found that she was receiving great results. So she recommended
him to my grandmother and we started seeing him, and
it was great results. I was having clear skin, my
skin wasn't as irritable. I was wearing shorts for the
(07:49):
first time at sixteen with concidence. But within that year
of treatment from the dermatologists, I started having really really
bad headaches all day and night, vomiting clear fluid, being
unbalanced when walking. And my vision wasn't yet affected. But
I noticed that some of my peers and even some
(08:11):
doctors sometimes when they would look in my eyes, they
would say wow. And I'd be like, what are you
guys saying wow at? And it was that my eyes
looked like they were bulging in a more extreme way,
and ultimately I wound up going to an eye doctor.
The eye doctor just told me I needed to get
fitted for prescription eyewear because my eyes seemed inflamed, meaning swollen,
(08:36):
and I was just gonna be needing.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
That in reality what she had a pair of prescription
eyeglasses could not fix.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
But I noticed I wasn't receiving any relief, and I
came back to the same eye clinic at the hospital
and there was a different optometrist there who did more
of a thorough examination of me, and by the end
of the visit he declared that I had suittle turm
of cerebreath.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Both women with the same diagnosis.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
I am permanently legally blind. And the reason for me
saying permanently is that my I think nerves are too
severely damaged for me to be able to use prescription
I wear, and there's no procedure that can restore my
vision currently because of the damage from the aptic nerve trauma.
(09:27):
The way it was determined that I developed this pseudo
tumor because of the medication I was on from the
dermatologist the neurologist who was trying to figure out the
route on why I developed this. He told me that
when he evaluated my prescription history, there were seven out
(09:47):
of the twenty five medications prescribed by the dermatologists that
contain tetracycling. And you know tetracycling when it's in certain medications,
especially if it's in more than one, and depending on
what it's being prescribed for, your body can react with
it as an older dose. And so that's what ultimately
(10:07):
happened with me.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Devastating. But these women have a saying they lost their
sight but not their vision, and what they saw was
a full life starring them.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
I had to learn how to cook, clean though, and
used computer in a different way, so it was different.
But I just had to grin and bearry because that
was my life. And I never was the one to
sit down and just take just let life happen.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
I took life by the balls. Documentarian Lisa Durden saw
it too.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
When I saw this young lady go in the kitchen.
She walks in the kitchen, she's blind, opens the cabinet.
I'm like, this is a couple of years ago. I'm like,
she's in the house alone. She takes out a can
of string beings, opens the can, she gets the pot,
turns on the stoveness and said, woosh.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
I saw the flames.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
I said, she go to burn the house down, and
she makes the right I had never seen. Even though
I didn't know them that long, at this time, I
maybe knew them about two years by this time, and
I'm like, they can cook in the kitchen.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Their lives are busy. In fact, Naquela is a wife
and mother. In this clip from the documentary, she is
giving her a drible little daughter a bath.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Do you want to say a bath now? Yeah? Oh?
Speaker 4 (11:24):
Let go. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
I've come up.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
It's not always easy. When Nicola had her first child
at that time as a single mother, hospital officials tried
to stop her from bringing her baby home.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I was in a hospital and there asking me, well,
food's going to be home with you? Who's do you
live with? Anybody?
Speaker 4 (11:48):
Like?
Speaker 2 (11:49):
They wasn't gonna let me go home with my son
if my father wasn't with me to take me home.
If I didn't have my father did not come to
take me home with my son, And they wasn't gonna
let me go home with my son. They was gonna
let me go, but my son was gonna stack.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
When we come back here, what dating is like for
these blind divas, How Naquela met her husband who is
fully cited. Plus their message and warning to the Black
community about our eyesight and how you can make sure
to see the eye opening documentary Blind Divas that's up
next on black Land
Host
Vanessa Tyler
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