Life Shaping Events, Obstacles, and Risks

Everyone goes through the ugly parts in life. The ups and downs happen to everyone in life. These are the ups and downs of my life.

My first major event was when I was just 4 years old. My father made saddles and harnesses for a living. One day I decided to imitate my father. I picked up an awl and I stabbed the leather as hard as I could. Unfortunately, the awl glanced off of the leather and stabbed me in the eye. As you can imagine, it was not a pretty sight. The doctor tried to heal my eye, but it didn't work. I had severely damaged and infected my cornea. At first only one eye was damaged. Then I rubbed the infection to the other eye. This successfully made me totally blind.

At the institute we had a celebration for Valentin Hauy. He was the man that invented the embossed lettering system. At that time I was pretty much about to give up on improving Captain Barbier's nightwriting system. I was very discouraged. Mr. Hauy shook my hand at the end of the celebration. To me it was like he passed on a torch. That is when it became my mission to continue working on the system. That was the second major event.

A risk in my life was when Dr. Pignier was dismissed as director. The new director, Armand Dufau, did not approve of my system. He banished it and confiscated the Braille textbooks. He made all of the students use embossed letters again. This almost destroyed my system! Thankfully, Dufau's new assistant, Joseph Gaudet, had a talk with Dufau and convinced him to use my system. The students were still secretly using it anyway, so what was the point of banning it. Thank you Joseph!!!

One final obstacle I faced was tuberculosis. Because of the unclean conditions of the school, I developed tuberculosis. Back then, the doctors that diagnosed me could not make me healthy again. Therefore, I eventually died from the disease. In conclusion, I did not overcome this obstacle.

Those were the life shaping events, obstacles, and risks that happened to me. This concludes my blog. I hope you have enjoyed reading these posts. My hope is that you now know at least who I am and could recognize my name. Goodbye everyone.

Louis Braille

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