The first hint of trouble came when 16-year-old Sergio was playing baseball. “Less central vision in my left eye was making it harder to see the ball,” he recalls. “I was getting hit in the face by the baseball.”
As he sought answers, he began to lose central vision in his right eye. The rest of his vision became hazy. After six months, he received a diagnosis: Leber hereditary ocular neuropathy, a rare hereditary condition that produces loss of central vision most often in young adult males.
Despite his vision loss, Sergio needed to complete high school. “The world wasn’t going to stop for me,” Sergio says. “I had to keep going.” Sergio had been content to get C’s or D’s because college seemed unattainable. When he found out that organizations would pay for his college education because of his vision loss, his attitude changed. “I wanted to get straight A’s, but it was difficult,” he says. His teachers and fellow students helped him succeed.
After high school graduation, Sergio entered Wayfinder’s Hatlen Center, a residential rehabilitation program for adults with vision loss in Northern California. His sighted past gave him an advantage in independent living and orientation and mobility skills. Over his year in the program, he honed those skills, learned braille and enthusiastically embraced assistive technology.
But most of all, “I loved, loved, loved the people,” Sergio says. In the program, he realized that he had been hiding a part of himself. “I never felt I could be blind around my family or friends,” says Sergio.
“Before, I wanted people to see me
before they saw my white cane,” Sergio says. A Wayfinder instructor showed him a different way to think. Sergio explains, “You should never try to be another person. Show people all of you.”
Wayfinder’s staff convinced Sergio that
he could earn a college degree, even as a first-generation college student. Now enrolled at San Francisco State, Sergio makes the daily journey on his own from home to the university, using a bus, BART train and Muni light rail. And he navigates the campus with ease.
Sergio maintains his strong connections to Wayfinder’s Hatlen staff and alumni who were so important in his transformation. “Whenever we were at an event and we’d take a picture, I would say, ‘everybody say Wayfinder Family!’ It felt like a family to me.”
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December 27, 2024