BVRS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Director, Client Services
Brenda Davis has only been attending the Community Transition Program for one year, but clearly loves to spend her days with us. When Brenda comes to CTP each morning, you hear her greeting everyone long before you see her walk in the door. She is often dressed to the max in colorful outfits with lots of colorful jewelry. She has a huge personality that is almost as big as her amazing smile.
We do a variety of activities in CTP but if you ask Brenda what she would like to do, her answer is some type of art project. She has a definite eye for design and an enthusiasm for color. This is how Brenda became our featured artist.
When we decided to have an art exhibit, Brenda illustrated a series of characters wearing eye glasses. Her first exhibit piece, "Eyes Wide Open," was appropriately created for BVRS. "Eyes Wide Open" is a true example of her unique artistic style. In addition, Brenda creates what she calls "dolls." These mixed media characters are both colorful and well dressed, and Brenda likes to name her dolls after popular television cartoons of her childhood - like Bam Bam and Pebbles.
It's been rewarding for the staff to watch Brenda's artistic abilities grow over the past year as she has explored different mediums and styles.
It was a cold, rainy, windy day, and it was Diane Faust's day to take a bus ride by herself. She got to the bus stop and was terrified, wanting to turn around and go back. She was just not ready. But, she convinced herself to "put on big-girl pants," get on that bus, and go to the card store. It was only a 10-minute trip and the card store was three shops down from the bus stop. As Diane got off the bus, she headed straight to the store right in front of her. It was a pharmacy and she needed something for her headache! Then she went to the card store.
"But I did it," she says. "And it was a huge step."
Diane is rapidly losing her vision, and the bus ride was part of the training she received in the Personal Adjustment to Blindness Training program at Blind & Vision Rehabilitation Services of Pittsburgh. Before coming to us, the 54-year-old mother of two daughters in their early twenties quit her job as the business manager of an insurance agency. She had worked in that job for 15 years handling human resources, finance, accounting, licensing, and even maintenance at times. She really liked her job but felt she could no longer handle the workload efficiently.
She quit for the good of the company.
But, that's Diane. She cares about others. Her immersion in the 12-week adjustment to blindness training program was just another way she could lead by example for her daughters - just in case they are ever faced with life-changing challenges. She also is determined to remain self sufficient so that her daughters don't have to someday have the talk about who will take care of mom.
"I want independence," Diane explains. "By the skills and confidence I have learned here, my daughters will know that I'll be okay and they can loosen the rope a bit."
Diane recounts the day she and another student in the program went to lunch - alone - after a volunteer drove and dropped them off at a nearby restaurant. "We did just fine, and the restaurant is still there," she says, laughing.
Some days, though, Diane does not laugh and doesn't feel like leaving the house. Like the day - one of her toughest - when she received a letter qualifying her for long-term disability insurance or another day when a letter told her she would be receiving Social Security Disability. She didn't have to fight for those financial benefits, which made her sad at the seeming finality of her situation.
But because of the people she's met and worked with at Blind & Vision Rehabilitation Services, Diane knows that these feelings are normal.
Diane has had minor vision loss over the past 32 years, with cataracts and eye surgery at a relatively young age, and over the last 17 years her night vision has been deteriorating. She explains that her doctors aren't sure what is causing the damage to her optic nerves and are hoping, at this point, to find a way to preserve what little remaining vision she has left.
"This (Personal Adjustment to Blindness Training) program introduced options and gave me the confidence to try to find new ways of doing things," Diane explains. Along with riding a bus solo and the accompanying confidence, she learned safe cooking methods, how to use screen-reading software on a computer, Braille, smart phone applications, and she became more assertive. She likens this educational experience at Blind & Vision Rehabilitation Services to retraining her brain as she moves from a visual world to an auditory one.
As she completed her training with us, Diane explained: "Now I am at the place in my life - what do I want to be when I grow up… I have no clue… I've thought, ‘What on earth does the world do with people like me?' I have that fear ‘What am I going to do? What can I do?'"
Diane can do just about anything she takes on, is the consensus of several of her instructors. She is motivated, the A student all teachers enjoy having in their classrooms. And that sentiment is mutual. "I just think this program and the instructors are awesome," Diane says.
UPDATE: Diane returned to college and graduated last year.
Erika Petach was named president of Blind and Vision Rehabilitation Services of Pittsburgh in July 2010, and oversees all programs and services for this 100+-year-old agency with an annual $5 million budget and 96 employees.
Mrs. Petach served as a behavioral specialist consultant for Family Behavioral Resources in Gibsonia from 2005-2008, where she developed and implemented treatment plans for children with autism, and supervised therapeutic staff support workers.
Job Titles:
- Vice President of External Affairs
Marlane Fuhrmann is 19, and finally acting her age. There was the teen drama of buying a prom dress then breaking up with her boyfriend, getting her grades up to more A's than her mostly B's and C's, and making plans to go away to college in the fall.
It wasn't long ago that Marlane was acting like an adult-a mother, actually, to her little sister-a role she played since she was 7 years old. Marlane's life story is incredibly sad, starting even before she was born. When her birth mother was pregnant with Marlane and in her third trimester, she was in a car accident that caused damage to her unborn daughter's eyes.
Marlane was born with nystagmus, a vision condition characterized by involuntary eye movement that often results in reduced vision. Her eyes jump around, often in different directions, making it difficult to focus on objects. She wore glasses as a toddler and had surgery at age 4 to correct her "sideways" vision. She had to turn her head sideways in order to see straight. The surgery worked, but by the time she was 10 her vision worsened.
"For my whole life I compensated," Marlane said. "I would sit up front in class to see the board." She actually didn't realize how bad her vision was because there were problems at home. "I didn't worry about my eyes."
To make a sad, long story short: Marlane and her little sister are now with a foster mother, and she relies heavily on her strong faith.
Marlane spent a week this summer at Blind & Vision Rehabilitation Services of Pittsburgh in the Access Technology program, learning Internet research, word processing, basic Windows® concepts, among other technologies. She said her training at BVRS has helped her be more specific in conducting Internet searches, has given her a better understanding of programs like ZoomText, which enlarges the entire computer screen, and has taught her how to customize the computer screen.
Marlane proved to be an excellent student, according to BVRS staff, considering she never received special accommodations in school until she was a senior this past year. Her foster mother made sure she was examined by a specialist who has dealt with many cases of nystagmus. And she now wears contact lenses and has hopes of maybe one day getting a driver's license - limited to daytime driving.
"When I graduated from high school I was so excited because I never thought I would," Marlane said. "And my vision is improving when I thought it never would."
When Sharol Geisser was 12 years old she was determined to participate in the local walk for the March of Dimes. She did it, but that evening after the walk she had to crawl just to get around.
Sharol was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when she was in 3rd grade, and was not able to participate in sports or even take gym class as she was growing up. JRA occurs in children under age 16 and causes joint swelling, stiffness and sometimes reduced motion. It can affect any joint and sometimes internal organs as well, and can lead to serious complications such as growth problems and eye inflammation.
But that diagnosis would not stop Sharol from the walk, and-some 27 years later-it did not stop her from completing a 4,000-mile roundtrip from her home in East Helena, Montana, to Homestead, Pennsylvania.
Sharol is losing her vision due to what is now rheumatoid arthritis, and she came to Blind & Vision Rehabilitation Services of Pittsburgh and its Personal Adjustment to Blindness Training program for help.