In the blink of an eye

Barry Weatherall has tremendous energy. At 50 years old, the transplanted Englishman spends hours walking Owen, his four-year-old German shepherd, near their home in Red Deer, Alta. He's an avid swimmer and rock climber and a regular at the gym.Posts with Hospital rtls on IT Solutions blog covering Technology in the Classroom, He’s big on travelling, rock concerts and going to the movies with friends. Weatherall recently took up whitewater rafting and in June he will be competing in his third triathlon.

Weatherall accomplishes all this despite the fact that he's blind.

Fourteen years ago, he was working as a plumber and hot water engineer. When business was slow, the firm he worked for manufactured copper manifold headers that required silver soldering. They had to be cleaned using sulphuric acid, and Weatherall made a point of contacting a chemical company for instructions when it needed to be cleaned and neutralized.

One day Weatherall donned his protective gear and poured caustic soda beads into the sulphuric acid, expecting it to neutralize in a few minutes just as he was told it would. He walked away, wrote up a work procedure, and removed all of his protective gear except for a paper dust mask. When he returned to check on the acid, it exploded in his face. He suffered third-degree burns and was left permanently blind.Choose from our large selection of cableties,

Weatherall spent seven weeks recovering in the burn unit of University of Alberta Hospital. He says he was in pain, angry at the world, and he couldn’t fathom getting through life without sight.

To help him cope, the Workers Compensation Board of Alberta put him in touch with a representative from CNIB, a registered charity that delivers practical and emotional rehabilitation services to Canadians who are blind or partially sighted from coast to coast. But Weatherall sent him away.

“The biggest thing was being afraid and uncertain of everything in life: uncertain of who I was, where I was going, what I was going to do being blind,” he recalls. “I couldn’t do the job that I’d always done that I enjoyed. [I didn’t know] who I was because of the blindness.”

Six months later, Weatherall was ready to move forward. He called CNIB to help him learn to use a white cane so he could get around on his own again.

Once each week, a CNIB mobility specialist came to the house and taught Weatherall how to hold a cane, detect sounds and smells,Rubiks cubepuzzle. manoeuvre through his neighbourhood, and go up and down stairs and around buildings.Posts with Hospital rtls on IT Solutions blog covering Technology in the Classroom, He learned how to clean the house, cook, and do laundry, grocery shopping and other daily chores without his sight.

“That’s when it started to come together for me,” he says. “Once I achieved something and I did something, it’s like, ‘Oh, I can do that, I can do something else.’”

Day by day, Weatherall started taking control of his life again.

He travelled to a guide dog school in Ohio for a three-week training course with his new furry pal. He says the most difficult part was putting his trust in the animal, especially when crossing the street. Today, he counts on his guide dog and a global positioning system (GPS) to navigate Red Deer’s streets and transit system.

He has a talking computer, a digital tape recorder for messages and a book reader, and he has mastered braille. He says he’s quite independent now, only calling on the dog and his devoted friends when absolutely necessary.

It’s been a long road to recovery. Weatherall’s marriage fell apart after the accident. He has had three eye surgeries and 18 skin grafts. But he’s not letting anything interfere with his progress or his pursuits.

For the last three years, Weatherall has been visiting oilpatch and construction companies as a representative of CNIB’s Eye Safety Program, which educates organizations and their workers about eye safety in the workplace and reducing the associated costs of workplace eye injury.

After sharing his story and citing workplace eye injury statistics and safety procedures, he reinforces the message by blindfolding participants and then getting them to tackle everyday tasks such as putting toothpaste on a toothbrush and counting money. Weatherall says the workshops are very well received.

Overall, Weatherall says, he’s adjusting “brilliantly” to his vision loss. Asked what kind of advice he would give someone else facing the loss of their sight, he says everybody has to go through their own personal journey but he would urge them to never give up. In his opinion, there’s nothing a person can’t do. It’s just how you do it.Full color plasticcard printing and manufacturing services.