How poor eyesight led to a great vision

She originally wanted to become a family physician, but Penny Robredo Bundoc, who is visually impaired, sort of stumbled upon rehab medicine. It was an accident of fate that had meant a world of difference to Filipinos with disabilities.

When Bundoc applied for a residency in Family Medicine at the UP-PGH, she learned that it was no longer offered as a specialty. On her advisers suggestion, she went into Rehabilitation Medicine instead.

That decision ultimately meant that PWDs (persons with disability) in the Philippines no longer had to be shut in, but could instead stride out of their homes to go to school, earn a living and otherwise have fuller lives.

Coping with poverty is hard; (more so) when a family member has a disability, mused Bundoc, who has become a staunch advocate of PWDs.

Poverty is magnified and multiplied for such families, she said, explaining that an able family member is usually designated as the caregiver, which means one less member contributing to family finances.

The emotional and psychological trauma adds to the burden, said this medic. Our society values physical beauty so much. Those with obvious physical disabilities are pitied at best, and at worst, are mocked and ostracized, even abandoned or abused by their own families.

Bundocs own family knows disability firsthand. Through their father, Jose Chan Lim Robredo, the Robredo siblings inherited the gene for retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable or degenerative eye disease that causes severe visual impairment and, often enough, blindness.

During childhood summer vacations, Bundoc recalled how the entire brood would travel to Manila to be thoroughly checked by a renowned eye specialist, although their parents never told them the reason for the annual check-ups.

We just thought going to an eye specialist was part of our summer vacation routine, this rehab doctor recounted. It was only when I was much older that I realized my father had become blind by the time I was born and that he never actually saw me. But he was such a can-do type of man, very much the head of our family that I didnt realize he was in any way impaired until I was much older.

By the time Bundoc was born, her father was no longer a practicing accountant but had gone into lumber trading, and later, the fishing trawl business. He was self-taught in the latter. A toy tug boat among his childrens playthings was the model for the fishing trawls that the woodworkers used on Robredos instructions. Each boat was named after one of his children.

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How poor eyesight led to a great vision