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BY PRISCILLA GREEAR
Staff Writer
FOREST PARK--Using her hearing and sense of touch to replace her lost
vision, Georgia Nunnally listens to the grease sizzling against her iron
skillet and feels the bread’s texture against her spatula as she cooks one
of her favorite sandwiches, a grilled cheese.
When cooking a pot of beans, Nunnally, who became blind after a stroke nine
years ago, relies on an adapted watch to track her cooking time and tests beans
for doneness with her stirring spoon.
“Listen, listen, listen to your pots. Listen to the contents in your
pots. Suddenly your ears become your eyes when cooking,” she said.
“With cooking a pot of beans--stir beans. Remember your time and stir your
beans and you get the feel of how things feel when they get cooked.”
Red liquid plastic dots called “hi marks” convey the heat levels
on her stove’s temperature dial as well as on the thermostat.
Cooking is just one of the rehabilitation skills that Nunnally, 71, has
learned through the Community Adult Services Program for the visually impaired
or blind. Offered since 1974 through the Center for the Visually Impaired, the
program provides comprehensive rehabilitation services in a home, senior center
or hospital. From 1997-98, it served 336 shut-ins. Services include mobility
training, personal care, food preparation and nutrition, clothing care,
communication skills, household budget and money management skills and home
maintenance instruction.
Nunnally appears both careful and cheerful as she moves about her home in
Forest Park where she has lived for 30 years. A widow whose two daughters live
out of state, she now resides alone more independently through the
rehabilitative program. After being on a waiting list for several months, she
completed the program in May after rehabilitation teacher and orientation and
mobility specialist Scott Crawford taught her up to twice weekly for a year.
She was originally referred to the center’s low-vision clinic by her
doctor nine years ago and began receiving training through the Georgia
Department of Human Resources as her vision began to deteriorate. The
program’s social worker of 21 years, Nell Robinson, has worked with her as
needed since 1997 to determine her needs, giving her referrals for services
such as medical transportation, programs at the low-vision clinic and
counseling as problems arise.
Nunnally talked about her training sessions at home. “When they come,
they stay one and a half to two hours. If they don’t get through with it,
they stay until they get through with it--that particular little thing that
they’re showing you,” Nunnally said. “There is not a set time
for no one particular person--one person might complete (the training) faster
than somebody else.”
Sitting at her kitchen table for an interview July 8, Nunnally said she
always tries to eat well-balanced meals, adding that yesterday she cooked a pot
roast with carrots, potatoes and a tossed salad. She has been taught by CVI to
always do things the same way and keep things in the same places, remembering
the feel and location of things. She always stores food in the same containers
and, when preparing meals, always places her vegetables on the sides of her
plate, the bread up top and the meat on the bottom.
“Anything you do, you need to do it the same way each time. By doing it
the same way each time you get better doing it,” she said, with a friendly
Southern drawl. “If you want to keep up with your things you put them in
one place and you leave them in one place.”
With short, curly gray hair and an all-American smile, Nunnally said the
most important things the program has given her are motivation and confidence
to meet the challenges of daily life. When she presents staff members with a
problem, she is confident of her ability to overcome it.
“They reassure you that you can do this, that and the other. With
impaired vision, there is no right way to do something. There is one more way
to do things. The way you do it may not work for Mrs. Jones or Mrs. Smith, but
it works for you.”
She said that before she received training, household activities required
every ounce of strength she had. “I was really struggling very much. So
(Crawford) just came in and made life easier and more simplified and showed me
that I could do it,” she said. “I can’t begin to tell you how
much patience they have.”
She is most grateful to CVI for its programs and skilled staff. “I
don’t know what I would be. I don’t know how I could handle
everything that I handle without the training.”
She has learned how to walk with a white cane and hold onto a sighted guide
when leaving the house. And when, for instance, she is missing her cane, she
can go down steps by feeling them with the balls of her feet. To go into her
backyard and hang pillows on her clothesline on sunny, windy days, she finds
her direction by walking out to a building behind her house, taking three steps
backwards and then going right, and then identifying the clothesline with her
cane.
She can write checks and, in making grocery lists for her shopping
companion, has learned to write an item and then fold the paper so that she
won’t write one over another.
When clothes shopping with a companion, Nunnally also sees through her
hands. After requesting to choose from certain clothing items, “my looking
at the garment is my feel of it. I can feel if I don’t like this or I like
this. Your hands become your eyes,” she said.
To coordinate outfits after shopping, she immediately picks out safety pins
and buttons and puts the same number, sizes and arrangement of them on the
corner of a shirt and pants or the skirt of an outfit. She identifies dresses
by feeling the belt, neckline, sleeves or waistline. After doing laundry she
lays clothes on her bed and identifies matching items by their markings,
hanging them together in her closet.
As she was unable to learn the more common Braille communication system due
to lack of tactile sensitivity, she said her biggest challenge was to learn the
Fishburne Alphabet, a personal communication system using four basic symbols.
Embossing symbols on tape, she labels food cans, writes phone numbers and other
items through that system.
While it initially took her three months to knit one square after losing her
vision, Nunnally, a Catholic, enjoys doing things at home like crocheting
afghans for the sick, having given away nearly 100 to a nursing home once and
some 5,000 in the past 10 years. She proudly revealed a stack in a bedroom,
saying that she is working on a bundle for cancer patients at Atlanta’s
Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home.
When the mood strikes, she also makes poodle ornaments of crochet thread,
black and white angels with wings of tulle and red, white and green potholders.
All become gifts to give away at Christmastime and other occasions.
“I do it for the fun there is in it,” she said. “Isn’t
that better than taking a nerve pill?”
With a home filled with religious images including “The Last
Supper,” Mary, a plaque with “My Kitchen Prayer,” and her patron
saint, St. Therese of Lisieux, Nunnally’s greatest instructor is the Lord.
“With the faith that I have in my God, he teaches you to handle things
and it’s left up to you to handle it. We all have shortcomings, but we
don’t dwell on those shortcomings. We dwell on the things that we can
change and make better,” she said in her matter-of-fact way.
Lacking transportation to attend Mass, she added that she worships weekly by
faithfully listening to the 5 a.m. Sunday televised Mass.
Nunnally said she wishes she could see and every day is still a challenge.
“Everything takes patience. You must have patience,” she said.
Yet a challenge is a good thing. “I’ve always been a believer, but
maybe (blindness) is to make me stronger. Maybe it is for Mrs. Smith to see me
and how I survive. Maybe it’s to make a stronger believer out of her.
It’s just one of those mysterious things.”
She is grateful that something worse didn’t happen to her. “People
that can see, we take it for granted, you know, and if you can’t see, you
don’t take anything for granted,” she said. “I’ve always
been a thankful person but I think I’m more thankful now. I have a lot of
people to say to me, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I feel so sorry for
you.’ I say, ‘Don’t you feel sorry for me. You have
compassion.’ There is a difference.”
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