Over the last couple of weeks, Carol Baker has been flipping through pictures of her young grandkids. The images show how they grew over the first few years of their lives, and the little faces which until recently, Baker never knew.
As her sight suddenly deteriorated two years ago, she initially thought there was something wrong with her new glasses or that she'd been given the wrong pair. The Victoria woman has been nearly blind ever since, with her vision reduced to just faint blurs.
Losing her sight also stripped Baker of her independence. Her son had to walk her to the bus stop, she wasn't able to babysit her young grandchildren by herself and the support worker was robbed of providing life-saving efforts to some of Victoria's most vulnerable.
The blindness also led to her falling several times, with the most recent one sending her to hospital as she suffered fractured ribs and other injuries. Baker was set to languish without her sight for likely another year before the health-care system could get her in for surgery.
But that changed after she recently got support from Victoria Orange Shirt Day, which helped Baker connect with a local optometry clinic that performed surgery on one of her eyes in July.
After regaining her sight, she's spent the last few weeks looking at pictures of her two grandchildren who were born after she lost her vision. "It was a happy moment," Baker said of the first time she glimpsed the photos of her family's newest additions.
"My four-year-old granddaughter asked 'Grandma, why are you staring at me?' and then she says 'Oh yeah, you can see me now,'" Baker said with a chuckle. "When I got home, all I did was stare at my granddaughters and my grandson."
She also has another family – one that's equally happy that Baker has her sight back. While working at House of Courage, a Vic West supportive housing site for Indigenous folks experiencing homelessness, she valued being able to offer hands-on help to residents she calls family members.
But not being able to see meant that for the last few years, the support worker who would commonly revive people could only assist others, answer phones, prepare ready-made meals or help with similar tasks. Not being involved during the tough moments drove Baker crazy, but with her eyesight restored, she's been able to once again administer naloxone or use a defibrillator to bring people back from overdoses.
“I love what I’m doing,” Bakers said. “Lately we’ve been lucky because we’ve been able to save them.”
Upon arriving at work, Baker always catches up with the residents. Even those deep in the throws of their addiction will make the effort to say hi and ask how she's doing, she said. And on her first day back following the eye surgery, the residents who call her 'Auntie' or 'Mamacita' swarmed Baker as they were happy to have her back.
For the last few years, she could only recognize the home's family members by their voices. In the last couple weeks, she's seen their faces that, due to the impacts of their substance use, show more than just a couple years of age. Baker took such long glares at the familiar, yet different, faces that the residents echoed her relatives and started to ask why she was staring at them.
"The one, he says, 'I thought for a minute maybe you were hitting on me,'" she said laughing. “Some of them are so hilarious.”
Baker said she thinks some of the members would be lost without her, but they also helped her by serving as her eyes around the site when she couldn't see. Others from work also helped her get through the last few years. As a forever lover of the graveyard shift, the support worker would almost always arrive when it was already dark out, but someone was always there to meet her at the bus stop.
Baker's work at House of Courage is reflective of who she is, said Victoria Orange Shirt Day's Kristin Spray. The pair have known each other for 25 years and Spray recalls how the Squamish Nation woman would volunteer at the Mustard Seed food bank or give up space in her home to people needing a place to stay.
“Carol has always been someone who likes to help,” Spray said.
Baker is set to have surgery on her second eye later in the summer. Victoria Orange Shirt Day is supporting that procedure by raffling off a hand-knit sweater and reaching out to the organization's local contacts to see if they can help. It also reached out to the eye clinic's doctors, who wrote back that their lens supplier may be able to lend support.
For now, Baker is finding joy in little moments. She's celebrated leaving the house by herself and getting to watch her grandkids again – this time without being watched to see if she'll put a diaper on backwards. Like grandmas tend to do, she's been taking crazy amounts of videos and photos of her grandchildren as they play in the backyard.
And even after a couple weeks of putting her renewed sight to work, she's still got more pictures from the last two years to look through.
