Precious Eyes: Guide Dogs for the Blind
ADA Sign Depot
November 08, 2013
Precious Eyes: Guide Dogs for the Blind
from the New York Times…
By PAUL SULLIVAN Published: November 7, 2013JENNIFER MURRAY woke after a night out with friends and thought her husband was playing a trick on her. She could not see anything and did not believe him when he said it was daytime.
“It was like a light switch had been shut off,” she said. “I shut my eyes, and I blinked. And I tried it again several times. Then I realized the sun was in my face, and I said, now what?”Ms. Murray had been battling to keep what little vision she had since her premature birth in 1978. She had a bit of peripheral vision in one eye but nothing else. A few years before the day when she lost her eyesight for good, she had an operation to implant a permanent contact lens in her right eye. It gave her sight such as she had never had before.
“I was giddy for weeks,” she said
. “I could see everything, and everybody was beautiful. I remember thinking life is so colorful and so pretty, and I wouldn’t have taken that back for the world.”With her vision gone again, Ms. Murray said she began to withdraw from the world. Her husband, an Iraqi war veteran, was going through a difficult time, and life was a struggle. With the birth of their son, Liam, who is now 2, Ms. Murray said she realized she needed to become more independent to care for him.
“I realized the white cane wasn’t cutting it,” she said. “I was putting a lot of unspoken pressure on my husband and my son, which isn’t fair to them.”
That was when she decided to try to get a guide dog.
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