By Corinne F. Hammett
If one didn't notice that Carol Lewis uses a cane to find her way around, one would never guess that diabetes caused the loss of her sight 14 years ago: her voice bubbles with humor and energy, her smile captivates and her enthusiasm for life becomes obvious after just a brief meeting.
Lewis, 37, says she had "a lot to learn, there was a lot of adjusting," when she became blind within six months after her diabetic retinopathy progressed, but she's never wavered from getting as much out of life as possible, or from giving as much as possible to her students at the Maryland State Department of Education's Division of Rehabilitation Services at the Maryland Rehabilitation Center, in Baltimore.
There were, however, two nagging concerns that could have led to serious problems.
Because of her diabetes, Lewis uses a glucose meter to test her blood sugar, "it was very difficult to get a drop of blood to go where it was supposed to go so I could measure it," she explains. So the Volunteers for Medical Engineering, which has a partnership with the Rehabilitation Center, came to the rescue. "They designed a device, a trapeze kind of thing, to put your finger in, turn it, and the finger is pricked and the blood falls where it is supposed to fall."
VME also designed a syringe-type bottle with a plunger to allow her to measure when the bottle is filled with insulin. "This was a very basic kind of thing, but very important to me," says Lewis.
VME, which has a team of volunteers who donate their time to design devices for disabled persons, has been given another challenge by Lewis. "I have a really old treadmill that I use for exercise; there's a handle in front to keep me from falling off, but I also have carpel tunnel--she works in the Center's office on computers--and the handle aggravates it, so the engineers are building me a different type of handle that will maintain my direction and won't injure my wrist. These are the kinds of things that I would have no clue where to find, and if I did find it, they would probably cost thousands of dollars to purchase. I think it's marvelous that the engineers are willing to do all of this."
Lewis says she was also impressed that the engineers "were very open to ideas. They will let the person with the disability describe the problem and then brainstorm to come up with a solution. They came back and let me try the device, then I suggested modifications and they were very open about this too."
Her disability hasn't stopped Lewis from traveling, in fact, nine years ago, on a skiing trip, she met the man who is now her husband. Travel, she says, is still "one of my favorite things. There are so many different ways to appreciate new places; sounds, hearing guides talk about a place, meeting people, eating local food, shopping in various stores, having people describe things to me, and since I had vision for so long, I can process what they are describing. In museums sometimes they will let you touch things and at Stonehenge (in England) they allowed me to go up and touch the monument; in Florida I swam with a dolphin and it was wonderful!"
This is the kind of enthusiasm Lewis conveys to her students at the Center. "I teach basic things; cooking, braille, daily living activities such as how to do laundry or how to tell the colors of clothing and I have referred a number of my students to VME. Our problems aren't standard problems to solve, we need some special adaptations, and the engineers are aware of this and willing to work with this, I am so very impressed with them," says Lewis, who is looking forward to trying her newly designed treadmill once the VME engineers have brainstormed the problem.
