Meeting Challenges: Ruth's Story

For years, Ruth MacCalman sewed them all and decorated her works with intricate embroidery.

About six years ago, she had to stop.

Glaucoma and macular degeneration were eroding her vision.

The pressure of fluids building in the front of the eye from glaucoma blurs vision, narrows the field of sight and can cause total blindness. Macular degeneration affects blood vessels in the macula, part of the retina, and often is associated with aging.

“People will put their arms around me, and I can’t see their faces at all,” MacCalman, 89, said.

A former accountant at the state prison in Deer Lodge, she quit working several decades ago after suffering a severe back injury in icy conditions.

As her eyes weakened, she gave up favorite activities such as golf and square dancing. No longer able to read, she has a woman come to her home each week to help with the mail and has marked the stove and microwave so that she can use the controls.

MacCalman stopped driving because glaucoma turned the white line down the road into a series of roiling waves.

She misses driving and is saddened at the prospect of giving up playing bridge with friends.

“I have to say, ‘Is that a diamond or a heart?’ ” she said.

She still has some of her sight, although her 98-year-old sister is fully blind.

MacCalman uses a short white cane because her legs go out and her hip can pop out of socket.

At the Montana Association for the Blind’s Summer Orientation Program, her orientation and mobility instructor, Tracey Orcutt, of Butte, adapted lessons in getting around to MacCalman’s physical needs.

In Aids to Daily Living classes, she learned different ways to tackle grooming, housekeeping and other everyday chores complicated by her vision loss.

A longtime baker, who also loved other types of cooking, MacCalman took both cooking and sewing lessons during the SOP.

Instructor Cherrie Albrecht, of Helena, showed MacCalman and other students how to use special self-threading needles for hand and machine sewing and to create special guides to move material in a straight line through the presser foot when sewing seams by machine.

“We just made so many things,” MacCalman said, ticking off sewing projects that included five pillows, six pot holders and a bag for carrying groceries.

She has two sons, a daughter, four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. And her sewing projects will become gifts for family and friends.

At the SOP, she said, “The people have been just wonderful. It has been kind of like home.

“They don’t look at you as if you can’t do this, you can’t do that.”

For MacCalman, the adaptive skills learned are a key part in her goal to remain in the Deer Lodge home that the first of her two late husbands built in the 1940s.

“My main desire is I don’t have to leave it,” she said.