<p>I am a native and proud Mississippian. Growing up in a small town, I was exposed to a life filled with dreams of a burning desire to succeed and the determination to set and achieve my own goals. In my high school annual, there is a picture of me looking through a microscope seeing that I was going to be a medical doctor or a researcher.</p>
<p>My educational path has been twisted and filled with obstacles, but my personal and family life experiences have been the anchors that continue to be my guide. Being raised by both grandmother and mother, I learned that education and hard work combined is the key to success. My grandmother did not want me to attend school at the age of six; she wanted me to work in the cotton fields and do domestic work. My mother refused; she took me away from my grandmother and made me go to school. One burning hot summer while chopping cotton, I knew that this was not the life for me that had been the career paths for the generations of women in my family.</p>
<p>After high school, I became pregnant and my desire and ambition of becoming a doctor was deflated. I had to refocus and reset my goals. I earned my Associate of Science Degree in Medical Laboratory Technology. While I was satisfied working as a Medical Laboratory Technician (MLT), I discovered that I had a passion for microbiology and planned the route that I would take in finally becoming a doctor. I had planned to work for 10 years and enrolled under the grandfather clause into a Bachelors program for Medical Technology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. After completing that program, I had furthered planned to earn a Doctorate in Microbiology and work for The Center for Disease Control. I planned for my dissertation to focus on the bacteria, Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus.</p>
<p>Those goals were shattered in 1996. I had to relocate to San Diego with my son because of marital problems. Both, my son and I went through hard moments of adapting to this lifestyle. By 1998, my son was in the ninth grade and playing sports and I was working as a Technical Assistant in a hospital. In 1999 and 2000, I had two cornea transplants on both of my eyes. The surgeries were unsuccessful. I was left with the fact that I could not wear corrective lens, declared legally blind, and unable to work in the lab.</p>
<p>During my recovery, I became more involved with my sons high school basketball team. I would talk to my son during the game and he would ask for tips in improving his game.</p>
<p>Before I realized it, I was talking to the entire team. They wanted to talk. We talked about academics, peer pressure, sports and other issues that related to the lives of children. As I interacted with the team, parents and the coaches, I began to focus less on the lost of my vision and more on how, what and when will I be able to help children. I had to connect the players needs with my need to start a new employment career that I will love and enjoy my future employment. To begin the connection, I had to return to school. Since 2001, I am more focus and determination as a student and as a person than I was almost 20 years ago. </p>
<p>Today, I see the connection by becoming a Sports Psychologist as clear as a person with 20/20 vision.</p>
<p>From the Editor: On Friday Afternoon, July 6, Dr. Stanley Wainapel, Director of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, addressed the 2001 convention of the National Federation of the Blind. Steve Marriott had just spoken, and Erik Weihenmayer was to follow. Together the three men provided an inspiring and exciting experience for everyone in the room. This is what Dr. Wainapel said:</p>
<pre><code> It's a great honor and also a little intimidating to be speaking this afternoon because I sort of feel that I am sandwiched between a Marriott and a mountaineer. But I am very happy to have the opportunity to speak with you and to express the great appreciation that I have for what the NFB has done for me. I am a rather young Federationist, maybe not in my own personal years, but I am young in terms of my involvement in the organization. When I came to my first meeting in 1994, it was truly a life-transforming moment for me, and I want to tell you a little bit about that.
When I was an eight-year-old child and was diagnosed with a progressive degenerative retina disorder, any hopes that my physician father and nurse mother had for my following the family tradition in becoming a physician died. I think that the concept that I might some day go on to be a doctor, despite a vision loss, was probably as remote to them as the summit of Mount Everest.
Fortunately that wasn't the case. I had a number of fortunate circumstances, and also I had some good choices that I made that perhaps made negotiating the challenges of initially becoming a doctor less daunting than they might have been. To start with, I cannot imagine the number of you out in the audience who can tell horror stories about your ophthalmologists. I strangely enough can only tell you love stories. That's not very common. I will tell you to start with that, when I was a teenager, it was an ophthalmologist who said to my parents, "Your son will be able to go to medical school. He will be able to be a doctor." That was a man with vision.
Fortunately my disease was also very cooperative about this, and it was rather slow in progressing. I also had the help of some guardian angels. To start with, my wonderful wife Wendy, who for more than twenty-one years has believed in me many times when I didn't believe in myself, and whose love has sustained me through many, many a dark day. I also had the other benefit of having employers who basically wanted me as an employee. It was perhaps not the common experience of people who are blind or who are losing their vision actually to have a person who wants you to stay there and will work through anything they can to accommodate you.
A great rehabilitation medicine physician by the name of Howard Russ, one of the fathers of the field, came from the state of Missouri. He said that he never failed to rehabilitate people if they met at least one of two criteria: they had someone who wanted them to work, and somebody loved them. I was lucky; I had both.
So, if you fast forward to about 1990, at that point I should have really been considered to be at the summit of my career. I was in a high-paying, high-prestige position. I was highly respected professionally. I was widely published, so you would have thought that I had everything, and I guess I did on the outside. But other things were happening on the inside. Now, I am sure that Erik Weihenmayer will be able to tell you a lot about what happens when you climb in the Himalayas. One of the great hazards is altitude sickness.
When you start climbing high in the ranks of the professions, one of the problems can also be attitude sickness. Usually the attitude sickness comes from others: the negative attitudes and stereotypes towards blindness that all of you know very well. Actually, there is another form of attitude sickness, and that's one that comes from within. That's what infected me. At a time when no one else doubted my capacity to continue to be a highly productive physician in spite of my significant vision impairment and progressively deteriorating vision, I didn't really think that I could do it. So I made a really colossal mistake, which fortunately wasn't a fatal one. I chickened out. I basically left my high-paying, high-prestige, respected job, and I took a job, a respectable job, in a respected agency for the blind as their medical director. There was nothing wrong with the job. There was everything wrong with the reasons I took it.
During the time I was in that job, I found myself feeling increasingly disconnected from the world of academic medicine of which I had been a part and to which I had contributed. So we will fast forward again to 1994 when, very ill in body, mind, and spirit, I showed up in Detroit, Michigan, at the NFB Convention. Part of the reason I was there was another guardian angel. Her name is Adrienne Asch. She is from Massachusetts. Now strangely enough, even though I think part of the reason I was becoming prominent in my specialty of rehabilitation medicine was because I had special expertise in issues of vision impairment and wrote about it and talked about it, I realized that, other than someone like Adrienne Asch, I probably could count all the blind people I knew on the fingers of one hand. That was a very strange thing. You can imagine the shock to my system of walking into the lobby in Detroit. It was a mind-blowing and mind-opening experience for me.
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<p>At that point my vision had probably deteriorated by half over the course of three years. I was physically ill with a gastrointestinal problem. I was ill with lack of confidence in myself, and, thank God, Adrienne had told me, "Go to the NFB; they'll show you what to do." And you bet they didI think the greatest speech that I ever heard in my lifetime was made by Martin Luther King. Of course it was the speech which was punctuated by "I have a dream." I think that NFB tells us and teaches us how to dare to dream. I too have my dreams and my visions of what I would like to</p>