Britnee's Story.

Just as Brittnee’s hairdressing career was rising, she lost her vision. She felt the immediate consequence of this life changing moment and lost her job. Eventually, she made one critical decision that changed her outlook on life.  She’s discovered new joys and relearnt how to do many things she used to do before losing her vision.  This is her story.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

S1 (00:06):
I woke up totally blind, opened my eyes ready, I
didn't feel like I opened my eyes, turning the light
switch on and off, wondering what was going on. Almost
feeling like a toddler stumbling through the house and just
having that daunting feeling of what's the point? What is

(00:26):
it to do? I can't do anything. I've already stuck
in this little dark room for the rest of my life.

S2 (00:36):
Hello, I'm Stephen Jolly. The onset of vision was no
longer being able to see properly, if at all can
be frightening, devastating and certainly is life changing. But in time,
not all bad. Many do tell us of the turnaround.

(00:57):
One such person is Britney Watson. Britney can explain to
us the story of her lived experience of this life
transition vision loss. Well, let's start perhaps with a little background.
Tell us about your childhood and where you grew up.

S1 (01:19):
I was diagnosed at the age of three with type
one diabetes. The tension was always on myself and what
I was eating, and I couldn't play for longer than
15 minutes and I always had to be a lot
more mature than any at three, four or five six
year old had to be. We traveled a lot in Victoria.

(01:43):
We weren't a very rich family, but we were very
rich in adventures and love and always camping every year.
I don't think there's a place in Victoria. I haven't
seen my little sister. She ended up eating type one
diabetes as well at the age of nine, and you're

(02:04):
ruining my life. So only recently, my older brother as
well got type one diabetes. So it is a family affair.

S2 (02:12):
So this this diabetes monster has been looming over your
shoulder virtually all your life.

S1 (02:17):
I don't remember a time not having diabetes. It got
troublesome as a teenager as I wanted to be. What
I thought was normal because I'd always had the attention on,
you know what? I had to eat, what I had
to do and how much insulin to have. And a
lot of thoughts had to go into all that and

(02:39):
you want to think about it more. As a teenager,
I wanted to do what everybody else was doing.

S2 (02:45):
Tell us, now you're about 28.

S1 (02:48):
Yes. Yes.

S2 (02:49):
When when you left school, what sort of work did
you get into?

S1 (02:53):
I ended up falling in love with hairdressing, and I
just flourished in and I was really, really good at it.
It wasn't hard for me to do. It was a
hard job, a thankless job, but it was amazing.

S2 (03:07):
So tell us about your eye condition. It's, I guess,
related to the to the diabetes.

S1 (03:15):
Yes, so at the age of 22, I woke up
with a black spot in my vision one morning actually
thought it was makeup. So I spent about half an
hour watching my face trying to get this makeup out
of my eye just to realize that it was something

(03:36):
a little more serious. And when I went to the hospital,
they informed me that I had diabetic retinopathy. So the
black spot was an actual bleed for this, or had
burst because I didn't look after my diabetes for such
a prolonged time. I also ended up with macular degeneration

(03:58):
as well.

S2 (04:00):
So did this eye condition come as a surprise?

S1 (04:05):
I guess being young and naive, you always hear the warnings,
but they always seem to be a problem for older
Britney for 40 50 year old Britney, not 22 year
old Britney.

S2 (04:19):
I guess it was pretty frightening, was it when you
woke up and realized it was this thing that wasn't
going away?

S1 (04:25):
Just a moment of shock? I would say so. Was
it more frightening? It was more. I'll just. Dumbfounded that
it was happening. Almost denial. Also, when I first got
the need, I didn't realize how permanent and how severe
it was. I assumed they could fix it.

S2 (04:46):
When did you realize that it was going to be
with you for the rest of your life?

S1 (04:51):
The specialists that I went and saw, I always want
to thank him because he was a stern voice that
told me this is the best, if we're going to be,
it will get worse. The treatment that you are going
to have will make your vision worse, but prolong this
site that you have. And pretty much told me he

(05:13):
wasn't going to treat me unless I went to the
hospital and started looking after my diabetes. I've never been
so scared. I actually rushed to the emergency room and
board bars out to the triage nurse say, I need
to see somebody about my diabetes because the doc is
not going to save my vision if I don't go.

(05:34):
She seemed quite shocked with that.

S2 (05:36):
So when you started to reflect was the things you
were worried about, like work, relationships, et cetera.

S1 (05:44):
It ended up happening was I was informed that I
would eventually become legally blind and then more likely lose
complete vision. But they did give me a target of decades.
I was actually starting to put away money because I
was going to buy a sell on there. I could,
you know, have people work for me but still be
in the field. I contacted Vision Australia and started to

(06:07):
learn how people use computers when they can't see and
see a lot of information in preparation, thinking that it
was going to be years down the track. At this
point in time, a lot of the reasons why I
had such poor diabetes was I was quite addicted to
illicit substances brought on because I was surrounded in it

(06:29):
with the partner that I had at the time. I
guess I was very distracted from the vision loss due
to the fact that I was leaving him, so I
had grief of leaving my partner at the time. Also
becoming sober and the vision loss honestly did take a backseat.

S2 (06:51):
Can you tell us about all that when when the
message got through to you, particularly to your family?

S1 (06:55):
I'm very lucky that I come from a very alien
family where humor runs our family. We were still very
humorous and laughing about a lot of things, you know,
dropping a piece of paper on the floor and not
being able to find it or running into a chair
because we could laugh about it. But I didn't like
the fact that they didn't call on me to do anything.

(07:19):
I used to babysit my niece and nephew a lot,
and my brother and sister in law stopped asking me
to babysit. And just with, you know, my parents, you know,
mom wouldn't let me clean or she wouldn't let me talk,
you know, at her being brought behind me, I would
stir the pot of pasta and I would hear her

(07:39):
stir the pot after I just did it. And with
the friends, I had a lot of my friends through Nepal,
and because I couldn't play anymore, I tried my best
to attend the games when I could. But because I
couldn't participate or be a part of anything, they just
stopped inviting me on, knocked out and stopped. You know,

(08:02):
they like they felt that I couldn't participate.

S2 (08:05):
And I guess just as you were sensing that they
weren't sure whether things were going to be okay for you,
you wouldn't have been too sure yourself at that stage
because you were just adjusting to it.

S1 (08:15):
The most distinct memory I have was when I was
out totally blind, so I opened my eyes, but I
didn't feel like I opened my eyes, turning the light
switch on and off, wondering what was going on. Almost
feeling like a toddler stumbling through the house and just

(08:35):
having that daunting feeling of what's the point? What is
it to do? I can't do anything. I'm going to
be stuck in this little dark room for the rest
of my life. It was very, very hard to push
myself out of that.

S2 (08:53):
Now you touched on earlier about getting support from Vision Australia.
How did that come about? And how long ago was
that

S1 (09:01):
five years now being in Australia? I first went and
sold the employment services because I wasn't too sure what
you could do when you're visually impaired or what you
can do when you lose vision or blind. So I
reached out to the employment service and I got enrolled
in the computer classes that had there. Once a week.

(09:22):
I would attend a computer class and it was very
positive to actually be around people at that point in
time that were already in the position I was going
to be in because at this point in time, I
actually had never met or spoken to anybody who was
vision impaired.

S2 (09:42):
What about the people providing the service? What was that
like and what was the sort of the atmosphere for
you around Vision Australia?

S1 (09:50):
They were very positive and very blasé about vision loss,
but in a good way. I went to regional Australia.
It was very much that they would help you if
you asked for it. But if you didn't act for,
you know, you could do it yourself. So it gave
me a lot of self-confidence because they didn't. Maybe me.

S2 (10:11):
Has there been support from the government that you've been
able to access?

S1 (10:15):
Yes. So when I did have to retire from hairdressing
because I was in talks with Vision Australia, a told
me about the NDIS and also Centrelink with the disability
support pension, but blindness, so I got onto them straight away.
The NDIS has been quite amazing for me, giving me

(10:37):
funding for a support worker, giving me funding director's vision
Australia's occupational therapists. The orientation and mobility specialists. All the
things that I needed that I couldn't access with just
a Centrelink pension.

S2 (10:53):
So tell me about the orientation and mobility specialists. What
do those people do for you?

S1 (10:59):
So the orientation and mobility specialist, the one that I
first met, he came up to my house and introduced
me to different parts of paints that were available because
I hadn't seen or been around vision loss, so I
wasn't sure what was entailed about a year round. Like,

(11:20):
how did they work? Do they talk to me? How
does it happen? And what he did was he just
explained how to use an ID cane, say how to
get in front of you across your body. Because at
that point I was really low vision. So I didn't
need a long time and just teaching me how to
walk around safely, how to identify different points so I

(11:44):
won't get lost. How to use the tech tiles on
the floor. I went 23 years of my life, not
realizing that the lines in the dots on the ground
were for visually impaired people

S2 (11:58):
and anything else that has really made a difference for you.

S1 (12:01):
I was told about a program that they were running,
called the Quality Living Program. I was invited into a
group not even a month after the retire and totally
lost my sight. It is amazing how much we touch
on topics about emotions and how to deal with grief,
how others deal with things and how we can get

(12:26):
by in those dark times and heavy, obviously, you know,
relate to.

S2 (12:32):
That sharing of experience with each other.

S1 (12:35):
Yeah. Knowing you're not alone, knowing that there are others.
Nobody really wants to talk about the demons of emotions.
But in the quality of living, I found that everybody
wanted to share. So it made you feel normal to me.

S2 (12:53):
These days you have a seeing eye dog.

S1 (12:55):
A year ago, I got matched with my first seeing
eye dog.

S2 (13:00):
And what's your dog's name?

S1 (13:01):
Her name is Coomer.

S2 (13:03):
And what does Creamer do for you? How does she
make a difference

S1 (13:07):
in every way? How they avoid obstacles for you? I
am so much quicker, so much more confident in walking around.
I'm never late for trains and buses anymore. And for
me to a companionship is. Sometimes I could be sitting

(13:28):
down and for no reason, just feel a lot of
anxiety and a lot of pressure on me. And I
can now just break down a pet, relieve a lot
of that stress.

S2 (13:39):
You said you moved out of the hairdressing world. What
do you do now?

S1 (13:43):
I now run my own consulting business training, customer service
staff and team members how to approach someone who's led
regional blind with assistance. It's one of the ways I
discovered the career path I wanted to take was through
a lot of talking and communicating through Vision Australia's quality

(14:06):
leaving groups. There was people that were totally blind and
they were lecturers at universities. One was even a horse
trail rider instructor, now taking groups of people out on
horse rides to the high country. And it really did
open my eyes in my mind to the fact that
I could do whatever I wanted to do. Going into

(14:26):
consulting and helping businesses be inclusive was a really big
passion for me.

S2 (14:34):
Tell us about your other partner, your human, when

S1 (14:37):
I met him at the start of losing my sight.
He doesn't treat me like I have a disability. But
in saying that it is also sometimes frustrating because my
eyesight is so fluid and so they're changing constantly. Sometimes
I won't be able to do something, but he thinks

(14:58):
I'm either like playing on it or I can see,
you know, I could do this yesterday. Why can't I
do it today? And it's very hard to have that conversation.

S2 (15:09):
You use a smartphone.

S1 (15:11):
Yes, I do my phone. It is everything. I have
a million apps on there, but they speak to me.
They read things for me, colored detections on their tell
me what train coming directly in front of me, so
I don't have to switch train coming again. Even with
the emails. You know, they read emails for text messaging,

(15:34):
read my messages.

S2 (15:36):
So these iPhone skills that have been able to develop.
How did that come about?

S1 (15:41):
It was a kind of look at an event that
Vision Australia had on. It had a technology train almost
in a classroom setting, and a whole lot of it's
got to sit down. And he talked about different ways
to use the iPhone with the newest updates, and this
game is a bit of a training session on how

(16:02):
to actually access your phone. And then from just a
lot of playing with it at home, with everything that
they taught us,

S2 (16:12):
tell me, what advice would you give to someone who's
recently gone through the experience of vision loss that you've
had to negotiate?

S1 (16:20):
My biggest thing with vision loss is that I try
and be happy with meeting your thought is trying to
be happy with yourself. I believe that anybody that says
that they are happy with losing a sense is lying.
You can be content about it. I'm very content with
my vision loss, but I'm a happy person. I'm happy

(16:44):
with how I perceive myself and how I have gotten
on with life. So a lot of people do comment on,
you know, how bright of adapted. It's because I'm not
trying to be happy with the loss of it. I'm
just trying to be happy with what I do with

(17:05):
myself afterwards.

S3 (17:10):
If you or a loved one are experiencing vision loss
and would like to know about the range of options
on offer to you, please call 1800 eight four seven
four six six or visit Vision Australia dot org.