INSPIRE ERIN SCALA CZADZECK
ERIN SCALA CZADZECK
Local mom provides insight without sight Jason Klaiber
E Erin Czadzeck with her husband, Tim, who has been known to present her with lovenotes written in Braille on occasion.
Photo by Edges Photography
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With matching outfits to boot, Erin and Tim are joined by their baby boy, Noah, for a well-timed photo.
Noah excitedly jumps out of his play chair.
March 2021
rin Czadzeck will tell you herself: she won’t let anything get in her way. Not even a pesky lamp or a chair that hasn’t been pushed into the table properly will stop her for long, though a pair of shoes left in the middle of the family room floor is liable to trip her up just a bit. Diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa at the age of 4, Czadzeck experienced gradual loss of sight in the ensuing years. By the time she was in her early 20s, she could no longer tell apart faces or colors, finding only enough vision to distinguish between light and dark while recognizing a minimal amount of movement. Erin’s father, John Scala, remembers noticing signs of impairment when she was about three and a half, back when she would grab her mother’s hand in the dimly lit restaurants and movie theaters the family entered. At first Scala chalked it up to a fear of the dark, but his daughter’s tendency to stumble over objects in her path and turn her head during a game of catch, denoting a reliance on a specific part of the retina, led him to believe otherwise. Upon being diagnosed with the condition in 1990, doctors revealed to Czadzeck that total blindness was a potential end result, so as a grade schooler in the Baldwinsville School District, she reluctantly began learning Braille at the urging of her parents. Amid that stage of life, when she found herself perfectly able to read with her eyes and keep up in organized sports — even excelling in some — Czadzeck didn’t see the need to acquaint herself with the tactile code, which she now uses for everything from labeling medicine to writing grocery lists. “I’m extremely grateful that that was a decision made on my behalf because I use it on a daily basis,” Czadzeck, now going on 35, said. Her visual decline happened to set in sooner than it has for others with the same genetic disorder, some of whom can, in their 70s, still read large-print materials and recognize faces.
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