It's the ability in disability that counts
Posted By CHERYL CLOCK , STANDARD STAFF
Updated 23 hours ago
On top of the piano is a framed snapshot of a woman plodding through a blanket of pure white snow on cross country skis.
She follows a single line of ski tracks that cut through an opening carved into the Algonquin park woods.
Trotting beside her is Ossa, a pure black Labrador. Her guide dog.
What you don't see in the photograph, taken several years ago on a winter camping trip to the provincial park, is her sighted friend skiing ahead, shouting out descriptions of the terrain: "OK, Fran, an easy three coming up" or "A twisting five."
At 51, Frances Tanner has been blind since she lost her vision due to diabetes in her mid-20s.
It was an event that both changed her life forever, yet strengthened her resolve to keep it completely the same.
Frances never really stopped doing all the things that gave her life joy when she had sight. Things like skiing. Canoeing. Camping. Even kayaking.
All it meant was that she'd have to adapt to a sighted world -- and convince someone to come along for the ride.
Impossible is not part of her vocabulary. And if you spend any time with her, the phrase you'll likely hear repeated most often is to focus on the ability in the disability.
Nothing much stops her.
Not blindness. Not the kidney transplant -- courtesy of her brother, Scott, in 1988 -- due to complications of diabetes. Or even becoming profoundly deaf in her left ear eight years ago.
This month, she accepted a March of Dimes' Breaking the Barrier award for her work making life more accessible for people with disabilities in Niagara.
The St. Catharines woman participates on a slew of committees -- Mayors Advisory Committee on Accessibility, Red Cross, CNIB and the Business Education Council.
And she's turned her passion to educate, motivate and inspire into a business she calls Tanner Talks. She offers motivational talks, workshops and sensitivity training on issues of disability.
And despite a petite stature that has earned her nicknames like Chicklet and Half-pint, her voice and bubbly exuberance command attention.
"I can sit back and have everybody else look after me," she says, "Or I can get up, get going and contribute."
In fact, in many ways, she has greater vision now then when she could see.
"I have a very powerful inner sight," she says.
* * *
Frances was almost three when she was diagnosed with diabetes.
She started taking insulin injections immediately.
She was 25 when she went blind. She remembers the day she pulled into the driveway of the home of her parents, Mary Jane and Bill Tanner (whom she thinks of as her heroes), in her snappy white Dodge Charger with the powder blue interior, mag wheels and spoiler.
She was working as corporate sales manager at a Niagara hotel and had been noticing that the lines down the middle of the roads were disappearing. And on this day, when she got out of her car, she told her mom: "I've got streaks of blood in my eyes."
The diagnosis was diabetic retinopathy.
She faced surgery on both eyes with her typical let's-get- 'er-done attitude. Yet, even then, there was a certain insight. She remembers the day she stood outside her doctor's office with her parents before the first surgery in October 1984.
"I studied them," she says. "I studied them because I thought I truly think this might be the last time I will ever see you.
"And I was right."
She never saw them with clear vision again. While she had hoped the surgery would give her workable vision, it eventually faded into darkness.
She sees what a television screen looks like at the end of a video. Fuzzy grey, with blackness behind it.
And while Frances knows it's very unlikely she'll ever see again, she hasn't quite given up that hope.
"I accept that I'm blind -- for now," she says.
"I hope that I might see something again. But that's a dream."
Yet even in darkness, she captures vibrant images with her mind's eye.
"My world, every moment of every day, is filled with colour, with light and pictures.
"It's filled with Kodak moments," she says.
"My eyes are wide open and I'm seeing it my way."