Hello Everyone,

Welcome to The Invisible Vision Project’s Blog.

It has been a while since my last blog, simply because I’ve been super busy with school, and also just life in general. It’s currently the end of school term/exam season, so, I’ve been writing academic essay and studying for upcoming exam. However, today, I do have a story to tell, and that is, based on the title I think you could already tell that it’s about White Cane; but, you might be wondering, why would I call my White Cane fragile? Well, read on to find out!

So, I’ve been a White Cane user for just about a little over a year now, and I really find it useful and great…but…for the past year since I started using my cane, I’ve had a total of 3 incidents of the cane got broken….

The first time this happened I was really scared. It happened in February of this year, and it was a cold, windy and snowy day. I went to campus for a meeting, and as I came out of the building and walking down some stairs, the moment I was on ground, the tip of my cane broke off! Luckily, I got some help from someone who happens to be on lunch break, and we called the local CNIB office and my Orientation and Mobility instructor came to my rescue.

Then, at around late Spring and early Summer of this year, I had a second incident where the tip of my cane got lose, it wasn’t broken, but it came off on its own. And because it happened where I was very close to my apartment building, I simply walked home carefully and changed it to a different tip for that cane.

And…just a few days ago on Friday, I was walking with my pink White Cane, and I’ve been using quite often since around March of this year when I first got it, and I find it more sturdy and better than the old one which is aluminum, since the pink one is graphite. Recently, I find the tip of that cane a little lose, but I didn’t think too much about it. On Friday, I was super in a rush and was running late for a meeting (I don’t like to be late!) So I walked just a little faster than usual, and I just realized that my cane was making louder than usual sound when the tip rolls on the ground. But, I didn’t have any time to check on what was going on, until I sat down at the meeting, I folded my cane and saw that half of the rolling ball went missing, but, what surprised me was that there was a smaller roller inside the big one, but it’s not very sturdy. Honestly, I didn’t know when or where did the other half of the rolling ball came off or what has caused it, but I’m just super glad that it didn’t die completely and then I probably wouldn’t get to where I needed to go! (But, I kind of feel sad that now I don’t have a matching tip for my pink cane anymore…)

So, this concludes my experience with very fragile canes. And, here is a question to my fellow cane users out there, do any of you have similar experiences? I mean this is kind of sad when something like this happens. I don’t know about how other blind/visually impaired people reacting to this, but I find it stressful, and maybe I am over-reacting to it. But, maybe I really should consider carrying an extra cane, or even tip with me wherever I go! anyways, let me know your thoughts, I’d love to hear from you!

Thank you for reading to the end.

By: The Invisible Vision Project