She noticed something was going on with her son’s eyes one year while he was making his list for Santa and was only writing on the page’s right side margin, but there was a lot more going on, underneath the surface, in the Owens family.

He loved skateboarding and skimboarding and was an excellent student, but this mother was about to have no choice but to teach her son how to advocate for himself and work toward a radical acceptance of her own.

Kim Owens is a blogger, wife, mother, author, and advocate. First she taught her son how to advocate for himself and now her blog shows people how to do the same, offering a place where mentoring happens for many other families.

This week on Outlook we spoke with Kim about chronic illness and disability, hers and her son’s, and about the ways they’ve found to navigate blindness with Owen’s blog Navigating Blindness.

While still newly navigating her own autoimmune disease, after years as a busy career woman in the marketing field and her own massage therapy business, Kim Owens started noticing personality changes in her always adventurous younger son. Known as No Fear Kai since he was little, and always trailing after his older brother on adventures, Kim started noticing his anxiety, requiring visits with several specialists to pinpoint just what was going on. As a mother, she had no doubt that something was happening.

On the show this week we discussed the long road to proper diagnosis, the freedom to adapt and thrive her son experienced once he received the tools for owning his blindness diagnosis and adaptive technology and braille, and the battle for access and accommodation they fought for against the school district.

Kim Owens has received a national braille certification, runs Navigating Blindness which is a resource for others newly experiencing blindness, and is working on a book about her family’s story while Kai is off, at university with his first guide dog, a young man out doing the things he loves most.

Check out the blog here:

https://navigatingblindness.com