| Description | Interview with Mrs Lomax, from Blackpool. She talks to Philip Donnellan about beginning to lose her sight due to having diabetes and a haemorrhage in one eye. She describes the feeling she had behind her eye and her treatment at hospital in Manchester , and her increasing difficulties in reading and writing letters. She talks about establishing contact with blind welfare workers, describes how she can still identity shapes and some colours, and talks about the process and experience of learning braille. She describes her decision to learn braille as an admission of her disability and goes on to talk about her positive attitude towards her condition and continuing to go dancing with her husband and her visits to the theatre. She describes in more detail the technical difficulties in learning braille and the challenges she faced in deciphering the system of dots and the problems in learning the contractions and abbreviations. She explains that her main difficulty is the loss of sensation in her fingers because of her diabetes which affects her ability to read the dots, and her blind welfare worker elaborates on this effect of diabetes. Mrs Lomax talks about her enjoyment of talking books but feeling that she is not using her brain in the same way as she would if she was able to read for herself. She describes the lack of independence she felt when she went out with a white stick. She talks about how she came to terms with her disability, the kindness that people have shown towards her and she help she has had from her grown-up daughters. Mrs Lomax's welfare worker thinks that people with visual impairments should be able to integrate into sighted society, and Mrs Lomax expresses her reservations about blind people having to work in sheltered workshops. She describes her reaction at being placed on the 'blind register' in 1965 and the implications of this, and goes on to talk about her different perceptions of sound since she lost her sight (tracks 1-14)
Total: 34.07 mins
Dubber's reference number: PLA KF549C0071180 |