The best way I've found to describe how I see is this; go to a concert or play and sit in the front row - that's how YOU see the world. Now, move back to oh, about the 30th row and that's how I see it. Nothing is blurry, but if you were to see through my eyes, everything would appear smaller and further away than you are used to. Plus I happen to be color blind and very sensitive to sunlight (hence the dark glasses in my pic - I'd just surfaced and quickly switched my mask for my shades)
There is a very common misconception that people like Metal and I have to deal with all the time, and that is that someone is either totally blind or is so severely impaired that they might as well be, or that they can just wear corrective lenses, have LASIK or whatever and be OK. People don't realize that there are a lot of us who are somewhere in between, and that present day medical science does not offer any solutions, but we are still able to function unassisted for the most part. If I had a dollar for every time I'd be reading in public and someone would say something like "Did you forget your glasses today?", I could retire, move to the Caribbean and dive every day for the rest of my life! Glasses just don't make enough of a difference to bother with for most things, although I do wear reading glasses that help a LITTLE if I'm at the computer or reading a book/magazine etc.
I can very much relate to what Metal said about assuming he would be turned away at the dive shop. In my childhood, I was always told "No, you can't do that" to just about anything outside of school or the recreational programs for the visually impaired that I was involved with, many times without even being given the chance to try, and it left me with self esteem issues that I've been fighting ever since. For so long, I didn't try a lot of things I really wanted to because I just assumed someone would end up saying "No, you can't do that" all over again. Fortunately, some great friends of mine bought a dive op in St. Thomas not too long ago and encouraged me to come down and learn Scuba. Last year, I took them up on their offer and was very happy to discover that my vision was NOT a problem when it came to diving. Maybe I have to look at my computer a little more closely than everyone else, and pay extra close attention to where my buddy is, but that's not a bad thing! Diving is a great equalizer and I'm very glad my friends convinced me to go for it! (If you've ever seen me plug Admiralty Dive in St Thomas on these forums, now you know why! I owe Duane and Laura more than I could ever repay for unlocking the door to the underwater world for me).
