Newsletter

Spring 2006

Losing Vision, Staying the Course

 

Charlie Prinn at St. Andrews Golf Course, Scotland

Charlie Prinn suddenly lost most of his vision in July 2004 to Temporal Arteritis, which stopped the blood flow to his optic nerves.  At age 64, he had completed two successful careers—he managed investments at Unum, and served as President of J. B. Brown, a Portland real estate company—and he had been looking forward to a very active retirement.

Vision loss came as a serious blow for him and his family.

 

“Calamity struck,” he says now.  “My family still can’t believe it.  But you quickly learn to work with the limitations.  People want you to do what you always did, so you find yourself asking, how much of my eyes do I need for this particular task?  You find there is much that you can do without vision.”

 

Take golf, for example.  Charlie became an avid golfer in his senior year at Bowdoin College, where he majored in economics after graduating from Stephens High of Rumford; a knee injury had forced him to give up the four sports in which he had lettered in high school: football, basketball, baseball, and track. Soon he was playing golf with a 10 handicap.  Nine holes with his wife, Frances, on a daily basis, and an annual golf trip with college friends became beloved touchstones of his life. 

Today Charlie plays golf two or three times a week.  Since he lost his vision, his handicap has gone up one shot per hole,  an increase he is intent on diminishing.  For practice, he hits balls on the indoor driving range that his friends chipped in to install at a Portland warehouse, where a spotlight allows him to pick up the bright whiteness of the ball.  When playing outdoors at the Portland Country Club, where he has been an involved member for years, or on an unfamiliar course (he still takes golf trips with his friends), “the key is a caddy or partner who knows your game,” he says.  “You need someone who can make sure you are lined up correctly.”

 

Charlie finds that relationships are the key to working well with vision loss and to maintaining a high quality of life.  Charlie and Frances continue to socialize with local and college friends.  And through his illness Charlie has formed ongoing relationships with the Neuro-Ophthalmology team of Joseph Rizzo, M.D. of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and the world famous Schepens Eye Research Institute in Boston.  When medical technology breaks through, he will be there.

 

Charlie credits the Iris Network with providing important support.  He has worked with four Iris Network vision rehabilitation therapists, who got him started reading Braille, evaluated his household for safety, and taught him to navigate with a white cane. They also helped him to re-learn the computer, using special features such as Jaws, an audible Word System,

and Open Book, an application that can read documents from a scanner.

 

Golf isn’t Charlie’s only avocation.  He serves on the Boards of Trustees at Saint Joseph’s College and the Portland Provident Association, and is a Director of J. B. Brown, is a husband, father, and grandfather, and loves the audio-books available free of charge from the National Library Service. Currently, he listens to five books a week; his special love is the classics.  “I would have returned to them again whether I had lost my vision or not,” he says with a smile.

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