Moving the Couch Closer: #BlindTok E:10

From the Mound to Here: #BlindTok E:11

In Episode 11 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson sit down with special guest [Janelle's last name], a former collegiate softball pitcher and occupational therapist living with Stargardt's disease, for a conversation that moves between heartbreak and hard-won clarity in a way that only this community seems to pull off. Janelle takes the hosts back to the moment everything changed: a routine eye appointment, six yellow spots on her retinas, a diagnosis delivered at speed, and a drive home that ended with Google and a whole lot of fear. She walks through the four months that took her from 20/40 vision to legally blind, a well-intentioned trip to Arizona that made things significantly worse thanks to a treatment she had no reason to question, and the surreal experience of returning to her college campus for senior year knowing she couldn't drive anymore and figuring out, one neighbor at a time, how to keep going anyway. What makes this episode land isn't just the story, it's the way Janelle tells it, with a warmth and self-awareness that makes even the toughest moments feel like something you can sit with. She talks about laying in center field staring at clouds, quietly counting down the sights she wasn't ready to lose, balancing a psychology degree with therapy sessions about fears she hadn't yet lived through, and eventually building a life that includes a husband of 14 years who tried to sell her on the word "chauffeur" and somehow got away with it. From the softball diamond to occupational therapy school to running five businesses, Janelle's story is a portrait of a person who kept making decisions under uncertainty and figuring out the rest on the fly, which turns out to be exactly what blindness and low vision sometimes demand.

Moving the Couch Closer: #BlindTok E:10

In Episode 10 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson welcome Joey [LAST NAME — unconfirmed], the show's first male guest, who happily jokes about finally evening out a panel that had left him pleasantly outnumbered. Joey takes us back to the early signs he couldn't yet explain, a high school stretch when the textbooks quietly slipped out of focus, and a driving test that asked far more of him than anyone in the room realized. When the diagnosis finally landed, it arrived in words no teenager wants to hear, and Joey speaks with disarming honesty about the anger that came next and the long season where giving up felt easier than holding on. The heart of the episode lives in what carried him forward, from a best friend who quietly nudged the couch closer to the big screen to the slow, humbling practice of asking for help. Murray and Tammy fold in their own chapters too, weighing small town isolation against the independence a bigger city can hand back, and tracing the tender, complicated choices parents make when a condition might pass to a child. There's a golf cart, an electric scooter, a young son who reaches for his dad's hand at every crossing, and a real, hard won sense that the road ahead, with the technology now arriving, may be brighter than any of them once let themselves believe.

Advocacy Through Defining Yourself: #BlindTok E:9

In Episode 9 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson are joined by Delaney Walsh, an Iowa-raised athlete and occupational therapy student whose entry into the low vision world started long before her own diagnosis. What begins as a family story shifts into something far more personal: a car accident, a quiet realization, and a teenager who suddenly had to make sense of what she had been watching from the sidelines for years. Delaney walks through what it was like to lose vision in just months, why she stayed silent at first, and how the people closest to her became both her translators and her safety net. Then come the sport stories. Volleyball, soccer, a varsity jersey that did not stay a varsity jersey for long, and a surprise athletic chapter that nobody, not even Delaney, saw coming. There is plenty here for anyone who has ever heard "but how can you do that if you cannot see," from blindfold drills and bow-and-arrow accuracy to the universal blind and low vision rule that nobody, under any circumstances, moves the furniture. Delaney also opens up about choosing a career path she had never heard of, finding mentors in unexpected places, and why the next generation of low vision rehabilitation specialists might just look a lot like her.

Disability Rights: #BlindTok E:8

In Episode 8 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson sit down with Alison DeFranco, an international human rights lawyer whose journey from small-town New York to Jakarta, Mexico City, and a tiny Irish island most people have never heard of started with a question her mom asked over spring break: why are you holding that book so close? What followed was a Stargardt's diagnosis, a wildly unhelpful eye doctor with a knack for terrifying parents in the next room, and the start of a long chapter of hiding, masking, and shooting an alarming number of three-pointers along the way. This one digs into the moments that quietly forge an advocate, from a college admissions decision that went sideways for all the wrong reasons to a New Zealand bus that talked back. Alison shares the airport adventure she swears nobody should ever recreate, the Irish ambassador who insisted she write a book with an unprintable title, and the slow shift from passing as sighted to standing fully in her own story. Funny, sharp, and quietly powerful, it's a conversation about what gets built when you stop apologizing for the way you see the world.

Discovery through Faith: #BlindTok E:7

In Episode 7 of #BlindTok, Murray Elbourne and Tammy Jackson are joined by Jessie Evans to walk through what happens when a kid knows something is wrong and the adults around her keep insisting it isn't. Jessie's story stretches across a decade of being told she was dramatic, of glasses that did absolutely nothing, and of a mom who flat-out refused to back down. The episode gets honest about the quiet damage that comes from being labeled a liar by the very people who were supposed to help, and about the slow, stubborn work of learning to trust your own gut again.   The trio also digs into the strange genius of growing up undiagnosed, where memorization becomes an art form and faking it becomes a full-time job. Sports stories arrive with all the grace of a nickname like Swiffer, choir rehearsals turn into an exercise in ditching the sheet music, and the conversation lands somewhere unexpectedly tender as Jessie talks about finding a community she didn't know was out there. Whether you've spent years masking or you're just starting to suspect you have been, this one is going to feel familiar.