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Hi everyone, my name is Lauren,
I'm seventeen years old.
I enjoy the arts very much.
I love history, ballet,
opera and theatre.
I was born with cataracts
in both my eyes.
And I had surgery multiple times
to try to remove it.
Most of it is gone, however,
I do have strabismus and nystagmus.
At a young age I've always
tried to find other strategies to
make up for like, not having vision.
So, sitting next to the board,
or telling my friends to
throw the ball slower.
I think the biggest transition for me
was going to high school where I dunno,
it started to get tough going
to school and like reading the board
or like large print books and there,
there wasn't a lot of that.
So I had to make adaptations for it.
I had really nice friends throughout
elementary, middle school and high school.
They're all really supportive.
They knew that I had vision loss
and they tried to help me to
the best of their ability.
When I was young, I came to
CNIB a lot for like summer programs,
which were really helpful when I
was growing up they showed me that
other people who also have vision
loss and there were other people
that could also accomplish many
of the tasks that I could accomplish.
When I got to grade six and
above they started teaching
us really important skills like
cooking or cleaning, and how
to adapt technologies for you.
At the summer camps you're
with a group of people that
are around your age and
you do many things.
Like, this year, we went sailing.
We climbed indoor climbing,
we did horseback riding and
we did, we even hosted our own
fundraiser to help our
camp for next year.
And these activities they were
really helpful because they were
like, activities that some people
in our group thought that
'oh these are really hard or
like challenging for someone
with vision loss to do' but, it showed
us that we could, everyone
could potentially accomplish
all these activities.
I had a really nice group of
people from the Toronto region
who helped with like adapting
tools that I could use
in everyday life.
There was also people that
helped me find assistive technology
to use at school,
or at home like CCTV,
or computer magnification software,
stuff like that.
I occasionally ask for
Orientational Mobility to help me
orient myself around the city,
or like, get to new destinations.
They help you make choices
and help you make decisions that
maybe you don't have the
answers to or maybe you couldn't
do in your life, so they help you
do that, like, they find assistive
technology for you, they help
you adapt things to how you
would live and you'd basically
take those skills and you would
help and apply them to your life.
So every morning I get up,
I go to school,
on Mondays I have band practice,
on Tuesdays and Wednesdays
I go to ballet school all
on my own and
Thursdays and Fridays are like
catch up days for like
homework, schoolwork,
I enjoy reading a lot,
right now I'm reading Atonement
by Ian McEwan for school,
it's a great book,
I really like going to the art gallery,
seeing operas, seeing ballets,
just having a good time.
I envision myself after this year,
going to university, hopefully,
and then possibly going to law school.