“If you rely on you're eyes only, you’re gonna miss a lot,” says Donna Hudon who, at age six was wearing glasses and at eleven she was using a cane at night. And by age twenty-three this guest was totally blind. Nights and days, she now has issues with her circadian rhythms like some other blind people (known as non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder), impacting the sleep-wake cycle which makes night shifts doable for her.

This week on Outlook we’re speaking with Donna, a personal care worker from Nanaimo, British Columbia, out there on Vancouver Island. She’s one of only a handful of blind people around doing personal care work and advocating, simply by doing this work, for more to follow in her footsteps.

Growing up in Edmonton, Alberta, we discuss the role Hudon’s sisters played, in the early years of Donna’s blindness, to get their mother to treat Donna like any other child and the influence this had on the trajectory of Donna’s life.

She’s wanted to work taking care of others and children with disabilities of all kinds for a long time. Even with a rehabilitation practitioner diploma and a degree in child and youth care,

Donna still had to push to get hired anywhere because employers wouldn’t look beyond the blindness. In the end, however, a little word like “no” never did slow this woman down. And now the Nanaimo Association for Community Living, where she works, is creating policies in their procedure manual: how to have somebody with a disability work to being an independent worker.

As she shares with us about her life looking for jobs, raising and homeschooling two children of her own, along with volunteering and being an active member out in her community, Donna shows why it’s important for those of us with disabilities to be tenacious in carving out a space for ourselves - in employment like in the rest of life.

And speaking of night shifts: Donna was just coming off of one of those, a twelve hour shift, to be with us this week, but after facing breast cancer a few years ago, not to mention all the discrimination she’s been up against when trying to contribute to her community and to the broader society all these years, she also likes to get away from all of that sometimes. So we finish off the show hearing about her favourite pastime…her kayak out on the ocean and being on a competitive cancer survivors dragon boat team because nothing slows Donna Hudon down for very long.

For more info on her work experiences, check out this article: "Blazing New Trails Takes Persistence: My Job as a Personal Support Worker" from the November 2019 issue of The Blind Canadian:

https://www.cfb.ca/november-2019-version-of-the-blind-canadian?id=2