If a blind man can see, is he really blind?

I am your host, Kevin Lowe, and this of course is the Lowdown on Life and Travel.

And today, you are tuned in to episode 11.

In today's episode, my plan is to totally blow your mind.

That's right.

I wanna have you rethinking everything that you've ever been taught.

Yeah, I wanna turn your world upside down.

That's the goal in today's episode.

Well, actually, there's gonna be three main points, but that's the most exciting.

Full circle.

From the day that I saw the last thing I ever saw before, losing my side to sharing with you the idea of what it was like to go from seeing in basically perfect vision to having no side at all, all the way full circle to learning to see again, just in a different way.

There are three main points in what I'm about to tell you that I hope you come away with today.

Number one, I want you to never underestimate the power of relationships.

You never know how that stranger that you meet is going to impact the rest of your life.

Number two, I want you to start questioning everything that you have ever been taught to be true.

And number three, I hope that you will come away realizing the power of experiencing a destination like a local is absolutely life-changing.

So with that, let's go ahead and get on to today's episode.

Hope you enjoy.

All right, before we dive right into the meat and potatoes of today's episode, I've got to give you a little bit of context of where I'm coming from.

So back when I was 17 years old, that's when I was first diagnosed with having a brain tumor.

It was something that took all of us for a surprise, me and my entire family.

Because never did we think that the different medical problems I had been suffering from were going to be something like a brain tumor.

Back then, no one had brain tumors.

We never even heard of such a thing.

But here we were.

It was the morning.

We were sitting in the pediatric neurosurgeon's office.

We were going over information resulted to the surgery I was about to have.

If you have ever gone into a doctor's office preparing for surgery, they always have to go over all the possible risks.

Why they have to do that, I don't know, because all it does is kind of scare you and freak you out even more.

But whatever, they have to do it for their legal reasons.

There was one of those things that just for some reason stood out to me and I've always remembered it.

It was a 1% possibility that I could become blind due to this surgery.

You know, it's just one of those things.

It literally was, if I'm not mistaken, the last thing that the doctor read off on the list.

It was the thing that we just have to say it's never going to happen.

Let's go ahead and fast forward two weeks from that doctor's appointment.

I'm now rolling through the operating room doors of the pediatric hospital in Orlando, Florida.

I can remember laying in the hospital bed to have my cute little gown on and all wired up and ready to go.

And I can remember seeing my mom and dad.

They had followed me as the nurses wheeled me to the operating room.

And I said bye to them, never knowing that would be the last time I would ever get to see their face.

But I went on into the operating room.

Everything was going to be fine.

You have to remember, I had no clue, none of us did, that anything was going to go wrong.

I can remember getting loaded onto the operating room table, and you had all the different doctors and nurses.

They were all scurrying around much too fast for it being so early in the morning.

It was such like this controlled chaos in the operating room.

But I remember they were laying there and I remember, of course, being nervous.

And so I just started praying.

And I remember just kind of praying as they told me to go ahead and count from 10 backwards.

And of course, I think I made it to probably nine and I was fast asleep.

That would be the last time that my eyes would ever see anything.

I awoke from surgery completely blind in both eyes.

No light, perception, no shapes, nor shadows.

I was completely blind.

So in fact, it turns out that I indeed was the 1%.

Imagine that, huh?

You wish you had those kind of odds when you played the lottery, but not when you were doing something like this.

This is when you don't want to be the 1% possibility.

But that was indeed what happened.

From that point forward, for nearly 14 years, I would know a world of nothing but blackness.

The only thing that I could see for 14 years was what my hands touched or the tip of my cane hit against.

That was it.

Up until 2017, when things changed.

And that's where I wanted to come back to the points that I gave you at the beginning of the episode that I want you to take note of.

And this is point number one.

You can never imagine the impact that a single person can have on the rest of your life.

I'm talking about a complete stranger, one of those people who you just connect with, whether on social media or out in the real world, you know, for the most part, a lot of the people that you meet, you never even talk to again.

But sometimes there's those other people who you just have that immediate connection with and it blossoms into some type of relationship, maybe just a friendship.

Let's face it.

Sometimes it's really amazing and you're left, you know, thanking God for putting that person in your path.

Other times you're like, oh God, I really could have done without that relationship in my life.

But today I want to talk about the positive side because I just so happened to make friends with a fellow travel advisor simply through a Facebook group that we were part of.

Two people, two totally different walks of life.

I'm from Florida, she's from South Africa, but we both had this common bond that we were both travel advisors.

And so we started talking through the Facebook Messenger and just chatting about our businesses and helping one another as we went down our path through that.

All of a sudden, one day, she had asked me, She's like, Have you ever heard of this guy named Brian Bushway?

She's like, I just watched this amazing video about him.

And I'm like, no, I've never heard of him before.

And she was so excited.

She's like, I've got to send you the video.

You're gonna just be blown away.

He can see by clicking.

He makes this clicking noise with his tongue, and I'm just like, okay, okay.

I mean, because let me be honest, at this point, I had been blind for almost 14 years, and I have dealt with so many false hopes of different ways in which I could see again.

That went all the way back from the very beginning when I had people wanting me to go over to China for experimental stem cell transplant surgeries and all of these different things.

And, you know, you get excited because let's face it, I wanted nothing more in life than to see again.

My hope would get so built up and I would be so excited, and then it would just be crushed and crushed and crushed time and time again.

And so when my friend is telling me about this guy, and even after she sent me this short YouTube video of this guy who's completely blind, yet he's riding a mountain bike, he's skateboarding all of this on his own.

And I'm like, wow, that's really awesome.

You know, good for him.

I definitely can't do that.

But then something else kind of happened because for some reason, again, relationship.

That guy, he kind of kept sticking in my mind.

I'm like, wait a minute, I gotta at least take this a step further.

Let me let me try reaching out to him.

So I think I did a little Facebook stalking and finally connected with Brian Bushway to find out, wait a minute, this isn't just a guy doing this on his own.

He's actually an instructor with an organization called the World Access for the Blind, where they teach people all over the world how to see again through echolocation.

I was like, what?

And then starts the total confusion, the chaos amongst my family and myself.

Because here you are, you're learning of these people who they say they're completely blind, yet they're doing all these things that sighted people can do, all by saying that they're seeing through sound, just like a bat or a dolphin can do.

Yeah.

Have you ever heard of such a thing?

That was our thought as well.

We're like total rip-off.

This is a scam.

But we just kept being curious.

And I even set up a phone call finally with the guy Brian and with some of the other instructors at World Access for the Blind to talk to them more about it.

I kept hearing more about it.

And honestly, the more we learned, the more just kind of confused I was.

But at the same time, there was just this part of me that was like, oh my gosh, this is this is amazing.

This is life-changing.

Then, though, I mean, I have to tell you, I mean, I don't mean to keep rambling on about this kind of back and forth feeling, but that's how it was because literally for 14 years, I have gone back and forth at this point of trying to find something that could help me.

I mean, I would do different pieces of technology, different new GPS devices that came out that were going to help me be able to navigate all around, you know, different canes that I would use, just all these different things.

Nothing ever changed in my life.

I was still blind, I still couldn't see.

And so this was just one of those things that was just one more thing for me to get my hopes up about.

For some reason, it just felt different.

And so we decided to trust.

We decided to trust God, trust that feeling and go with it.

And so, through talking to the instructors, and and trust me, this wasn't just me talking to them.

You better bet Mama got involved.

And that there were times when my mom would be at work and she would text me to let me know, yep, I just spoke with the uh guys over at World Access for the Blind, also, because I had a bunch of questions that I needed to get answered, also.

And I'm like, okay, thanks, mom.

That's how things kind of got rolling.

And I'm like, why haven't I ever even heard of this organization before?

That they're doing all this amazing training.

But we went ahead and we went with it.

Next thing I know, we are boarding a plane headed to Los Angeles, California.

Me and my mom and my sister headed out for a solid week of one-on-one training with Brian Bushway.

Growing up, I'm going to assume that you were taught the same thing as me: that we have five senses: taste, touch, smell, listen, and see.

We were taught that we taste with our tongue, we touch with our fingertips, we smell with our nose, we listen with our ears, and of course, we see with our eyes.

I've come to realize we were actually cut really short in education because we were forgetting one main point, and that was the brain.

We didn't realize back then when we were taught in school about these five senses that there's more to it than just the eyes that make us be able to see.

There's the aspect in the brain.

And that's where I introduced the second main topic that I want you to come away with in today's podcast.

Don't let yourself be limited by what the world tells you is true.

Each morning while in California, my mom and sister would drop me off at my instructor's house before they headed out on their day of sightseeing.

They got to be tourists in Los Angeles while I was a student.

Every morning I would get dropped off, as I said, at my instructor's house, Brian Bushway.

He'd always spend a little bit of time talking with my mom, filling her in on the previous day's lessons, as well as giving her an update as to how I was doing.

It's a tricky thing teaching a blind man to see again.

The process was actually pretty simple.

A lot of people, they got confused when they knew I was headed out to California to learn this.

They thought I was going to get fitted with some type of new high-tech piece of technology.

They were super disappointed then when I came home and I didn't have any cool gadget to show them.

Because what I learned was all in my head.

See, there's more to seeing than just your eyeballs.

You have your optic nerve, you have the visual cortex in your brain.

To see, I think is such a limiting word, I've come to realize, because we can see in other ways.

Think of a bat or a dolphin.

We learned about echolocation.

I know we learned about that in school, same grades that we learned about our senses.

We learned that bats and dolphins, they made a noise that we called echolocation, where they were able to use sound waves bouncing off of objects to determine where things were.

Well, who knew that we as humans can do the same thing?

Once my mom and sister would leave, we would generally start always, generally with a cup of coffee and talking over things, talking over how things went yesterday, going a little bit deeper and in depth than the uh basic outline we had given to my mom.

We would spend time analyzing how things sound.

Have you ever sat there, just in your house, when you think everything is quiet, close your eyes and realize how many different noises there are happening all around you.

Well, all those different noises, they're creating sound waves that are bouncing off of objects.

We're not just using those sound waves, we're making our own.

And that's what's really pretty cool about this technique.

Echolocation is what we refer to that bats and dolphins use.

But us humans, we use what we like to call flash sonar.

Using a clicking noise made with your tongue against the roof of your mouth.

I'm gonna try to make it sound somewhat normal without messing up the microphone because the noise can get a little loud.

So it's just a simple little clicking noise.

It may sound easier to make than you think, but go ahead and try it.

I guarantee you it's gonna be a little bit tougher than you think.

I can remember my instructor, he kept correcting me, going, You're clocking.

You're not clicking.

And so you got to get that really sharp click.

And so through different exercises we would do both in his house and in the neighborhood.

Slowly but surely, I began to see again.

What kind of exercises will we do?

Well, in his house, he taught me that there's different objects that make different noises or reflections of sound.

So soft objects like a pillow, they have a different sound quality to them than a hard metal bowl.

I know it's really difficult to kind of comprehend, and I'm trying my best to explain it to you.

It's just hard objects.

Let me let me put it this way.

Hard objects, they, in my opinion, learning echolocation were easier to identify because the sound is sharp.

It bounces right back at you.

And what ends up happening is through time, it finally came together for me on day three, is over time, your brain, the visual cortex, it starts to see again.

But through sound, what a lot of people tend to think when I start telling them about using echolocation or flash sonar is that I'm hearing the objects around me.

That's not really the case.

I mean, I'm using my ears for hearing to then use the visual cortex of my brain to create an acoustic image.

So literally, as I'm trying to say, I'm seeing through sound.

So as I'm making that clicking noise, my brain is interpreting the sound into an image.

So let me explain.

At one point in our exercise, we're walking through the streets of Brian's neighborhood.

We're walking up and down the sidewalks.

And now we are still using a cane.

I don't want you to think that I've given up the cane because the echolocation or flash sonar, it's just another tool that I use in connection with the cane.

So, anyways, back to where we are.

We're walking down the sidewalk.

Brian, he's in front of me.

Now, again, I have to remind you, Brian, too, is completely blind, just like me.

So, yes, you have two completely blind guys out walking the streets of Los Angeles.

Nothing to worry about.

So we're walking, and all of a sudden, Brian, he draws my attention to something to the left of me, in between me and the street.

So I get up to where he is, and I'm still clicking.

Now, at this point, I'm still trying to nail down how to actually make this sharp clicking noise.

But I finally start realizing that wait a minute, there's there's something right in front of me.

I'm not touching it, I'm just clicking and I can tell there's something low, something, the noise kind of seems to scatter sparsely.

Well, finally, Brian tells me, okay, go ahead and reach out and touch it.

And I touch it and it was a hedge.

So I literally could see the hedge, but it didn't make sense to me because I could tell that there was also a bigger, taller object.

And so when I touched the hedge, the hedge, I was like, this is much lower than what I thought I was seeing.

And so I immediately started to get really discouraged.

And he said, No, he said, keep clicking.

So I did, and as I kept clicking, he's like, Okay, now, now touch out.

There was a car parked on the other side of the hedge.

The car is what I was picking up on.

And so, literally through clicking, I could see the shape of the car.

I could follow without touching it, I could follow the outline of the trunk, how it comes up, and then it curves up the window and go along, and I'm continuing to walk alongside the car, clicking, I can see the edge of the roof come back down the windshield into the front of the hood.

It was amazing.

When I say see, I don't want you to think that I see like you do with your eyes, because it is different, as I like to say it.

I'm seeing in a different way.

Because I'm seeing acoustically.

So things are like I like to compare to a kind of fuzzy geometry.

Think of maybe different shades of black and gray.

So different objects may appear different to me.

Hard objects seem to come across as a really sharp, crisp black.

Other objects are a little bit more of like a fuzzy gray, but trust me, I see them, I can tell where they are.

And so that was one of like, I think that was day two that I saw the outline of the car.

It was day three, though, when everything came together.

On the days leading up to us heading out to Los Angeles, California, I had various phone calls with my instructor to learn more about what we would be doing while I was there and just to kind of get all my tons of questions answered.

There was one phone call that I remember in particular when I asked him, how long does it typically take for somebody to really get it?

I mean, like, how long can I expect for me to start seeing again?

He told me that typically it seems like on day three is when it generally comes together for people.

How right he was.

Because day three is when my life changed forever.

I went from somebody who was blind for nearly 14 years to somebody who could now see again, just in a different way.

It was amazing.

Days one and two, those were spent at Brian's house or in his neighborhood.

But on day three, Brian decided to come to the apartment that we were staying at, the Airbnb that we rented.

Me and him were going to work there for the day.

So just as previous days, my mom and sister headed out for their day of sightseeing, and me and Brian went to work.

We started out in the apartment.

We were starting to identify corners.

Corners of a room are particularly kind of easy to identify.

The sound kind of gets swallowed up into that corner.

And so we were working on this one particular section of the apartment.

It was where the dining room.

Meets the living room.

There was a distinct corner, you know, identifying the living room, corner of the wall.

Then it made a sharp left turn and formed the dining room.

And we were working on identifying the corner.

And so I'm sitting there and I started out literally face to face with the corner, making the clicking noise.

And I would then step back, you know, one step, two steps, three steps, continue clicking and see how far back I could get and still be able to pick up exactly where the corner was.

Well, finally, at one point, we had been working at it for a little bit.

I went back as if I had walked in the front door of the apartment.

All of a sudden, I could see the wall.

No longer was I just clicking and kind of picking up on little pings or more or less telling, you know, my instructor that, yeah, I was seeing what he was telling me I should be seeing, because most of the time, up until then, I wasn't.

But all of a sudden, I was like, oh my gosh, I can see the wall.

And literally, as I was clicking, the wall was in focus.

It was this fuzzy gray color.

And I was able to walk right up to the wall.

I never touched it.

And by clicking, I continued to see the wall, and I walked alongside of it.

I never touched it.

And then where the wall ended, it was like this deep dark black hole.

And that was the opening into the kitchen.

I could see it.

I walked through the opening with never even touching the wall.

I wasn't even using my cane at that point.

It was absolutely out of this world.

And at that moment, I realized the power behind using echolocation.

Literally, I cannot explain to you what it felt like for the first time in nearly 14 years to see something.

I was almost in tears.

I think the best representation of the power in this moment was when my mom and sister got home that afternoon.

I was, of course, excited to tell them about what happened.

And I remember telling the story to them, and I'm so excited, and I'm, you know, showing them, rehearsing to them, you know, what went down.

And all of a sudden, my mom, she was choking back tears.

And she said, You have no idea what it means to hear my son say that he can see.

Because that was taken from me 14 years prior.

And now all of a sudden, in this apartment in Los Angeles, she heard her son say that he could see again.

And right then I realized, oh my gosh, this is opening up a whole new world to me.

Now, when I talked to you about this apartment that we were in on day three for the training, I want you to realize that it has even more significance than just that.

Because when we looked at going out to California, we had looked at, you know, getting a different place to stay.

We looked at all the different area hotels.

And to be honest, we just didn't want to pay that much.

And that's when we started looking at Airbnb, which I know a lot of people have been using Airbnb for a long time, but this was our first.

Quite honestly, we were very nervous about it.

We just weren't sure about it.

But once we saw the massive price savings, we're like, you know, let's just go for it.

I have to tell you, that brings me to the third point that I want you to get out of this episode, is to never underestimate the power that living somewhere like a local can have on the rest of your life.

Because it was different.

I wasn't in Los Angeles as a tourist.

I was in Los Angeles like a resident.

We were there, that apartment, I loved it.

Now, granted, I don't think in perspective it was even as nice as my house here in Florida.

But for some reason, that apartment, it was just all me.

It was wide open space.

Wasn't anything huge, but it just had its big living room with its hardwood floors, clean lines, not much furniture, and of course, had windows open because you gotta love that Los Angeles weather compared to here in Florida.

That's for certain.

It just did something for me.

It gave me an opportunity to not just be somewhere on vacation or not just to be in Los Angeles as a student, but I got to be there as just a person living there.

And I think especially it was the case with being with my instructor, Brian Bushway, all the time, because I just got to hang out with him, basically like a couple of friends.

And here we were, we would just walk around the streets of Los Angeles.

And it was actually a pretty funny story.

At one point, we were walking down the street, and I mean, let's face it, two blind guys walking down the sidewalk next to a big, busy street.

It can look a little bit odd.

Needless to say, at one point we had this construction worker come up to us and ask us if we needed any help.

We, you know, politely told him no, we were okay.

Well, he didn't believe us.

The guy literally ended up following us at a safe distance to be sure we ended up getting to where we were going, which was just to a restaurant to eat some lunch.

It was hysterical.

We, of course, got a really good laugh out about it.

And again, it was another story for me to tell my mom and sister when we got home that day.

But, you know, California, the trip out there, it just changed me in a way that I never expected.

I think that's what made coming home so horrible.

I'll be honest with you, a lot of people don't realize it, but when I came back to Florida, I was depressed.

Everybody here was so excited to hear about my training and wanted to know how everything went.

And I was just really depressed to be back.

Because being out there, I got to see how life was for somebody like me who was completely blind, but lived on their own, lived in this town, this city that was different from the city that I've always known.

I mean, I'm in the same city that I was born in.

It just gave me this new perspective on life.

It made me realize the power of going somewhere, not as a tourist, but as a local.

Not going and seeing all the touristy sites, but just living life there.

It has a powerful impact on you.

And so if you're listening to this podcast and you're like, I thought I was getting some travel stuff.

Instead, I'm hearing all about this guy's crazy ability to see with sound.

This is what I want you to remember.

Go ahead and travel places.

Get out of the touristy zones and just experience life.

Go to the local restaurants, the places that the rest of the tourists aren't going to.

Do the things that are off the beaten path.

Don't stick to the main drag.

I promise you, you're gonna come away with an experience that is gonna change you in ways you never thought possible.

SPEAKER_00: And that's the lowdown on life and travel.

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And until next time, just keep living and enjoying life like it was meant to be.