SEEING IT THROUGH
WITH BLINDNESS LOOMING, DAVE BURDENIUK IS TAKING THE TIME TO APPRECIATE EVERY LAST SIGHT
Pasqua North, Coronation Park and Victoria East were some of the first words Dave Burdeniuk learned to read.
They were the names of the regular bus routes he’d take with his mother, Susan. He was three years old, and it was his job to help her get on the right bus.
She had retinitis pigmentosa, like her dad David Peters before her. It’s genetic. When Burdeniuk was four, he would stumble while entering a dark room, and they suspected he had it too.
When Burdeniuk was 13, a doctor confirmed the suspicion and told him he could be completely blind by 16.
“I could see my future because I could see my mother and my grandfather and I knew what my life was going to be,” said Burdeniuk. “(I’ve) had a lot of time to get ready for it. It’s not like this was sudden.”
The disease works over time; as the light-sensing cones and rods inside the retinas deteriorate, vision worsens.
“It’s almost like it can come and go. You’re fine in bright sunlight; you’re not fine in a dark lobby. Are you faking it? It’s more hidden because people don’t realize there’s something wrong with you,” said Burdeniuk. “Now it’s much more obvious.”
Today, at 50, Burdeniuk maintains some sight: He can decipher light and colour; his peripheral vision is all right. People resemble blobs of varied hues and heights. Sometimes, he can see a thick, bold typeface on a page, but gave up reading books a decade ago, which was hard.
He estimates his vision has deteriorated by one-third in the past year.
“Things will fade to black probably fairly quickly.”
As the director of media relations for Sask Energy, Burdeniuk is often in the public eye, communicating information to news reporters.
He can rattle off technical jargon and numbers as though he were reading from a script. But he’s not. He memorizes everything.
“People think because you don’t have really thick black glasses on and you don’t have a dog with you, that maybe there’s nothing wrong with you,” said Burdeniuk.
When he started using a white cane three years ago, an obvious indication of his disability, he says it came as a surprise to a lot of people.
That’s because he came up with ways to adapt, said Randa Burdeniuk, Dave’s wife. “Many people for a good part of Dave’s life didn’t really know that he had difficulty seeing. If it wasn’t affecting what he needed to do to help (reporters) get the information they needed, then it may not have come up.
“It’s not the focus of his entire life, but it is something we’ve had to deal with all his life so as things have changed, then we’ve had to become more open about some of those changes.”
According to CNIB, 836,000 Canadians have significant vision loss. The employment rate for workingage, visually impaired people is only 25 per cent.
Like a lot of communications workers, Dave Burdeniuk got his start in journalism.
After stints at the University of Regina in computer science, then in English and political science, he dropped out. His heart wasn’t in it.
Then the Prairie Broadcast Training Institute opened downtown, giving him the opportunity to pursue a longtime passion — radio. As a 13-year-old, he’d practise his “adult” voice and call into local stations. He once built a crystal radio from a kit. At age six, he and his sister Darlene would create radio shows enacting characters from Sesame Street.
“I walked into PBTI and the first day it was like, ‘This is what I want to do for my career,’ and it just lit a fire for me and I just couldn’t wait to start in the media.”
He wanted it to be his life’s career. “It probably wasn’t the smartest career choice, knowing that you have to read news scripts, but it was my love. I wanted to do radio; I was always fascinated by it.”
Third time’s a charm, as they say, and that was the case during Burdeniuk’s career, working at three different stations.
He graduated from PBTI on Dec. 29, 1985, and began his eight years in radio four days later in Prince George, B.C., his wage a cut below his managerial job at McDonald’s.
He knew people could be cruel — his mom was the brunt of hostility by strangers and family alike — but it was a shock to hear from the news director in Prince George, “‘Had I known you couldn’t drive at night, I never would have hired you.’”
Burdeniuk returned to Saskatchewan after five months to work in Saskatoon.
He didn’t want his disability to be an issue. He’d scout out news conference locations in advance, to help minimize the likelihood of danger or embarrassment — trip in a stairwell, hit a potted plant, pancake into a glass partition mistaking it for open airspace. (He does the same today in unfamiliar settings, like when he’s asked to guest-speak in U of R public relations or business classes.)
But after 3 1/2 years at that station, his general manager took him aside.
“‘We’re worried that your vision will deteriorate and you could be a drain on our medical insurance plan and we want you to leave,’” Burdeniuk recalled. “It rips your heart out, and you go home and you cry and you go ‘this is so unfair.’ I wanted to make the media my career ... my life. I was passionate about radio.”
He didn’t make waves; he didn’t want to make things more difficult for himself.
But as luck would have it, shortly thereafter he had an offer to join CKCK in Regina, the station he’d grown up listening to. In 1990, at 25, he became the youngest news director in its history.
In 1994, with roughly 80,000 newscasts under his belt, a volatile market encouraged him to switch paths and he got a job as press secretary for Premier Roy Romanow.
And so began an exciting new journey, working on “the dark side,” as journalists so fondly call it.
In this new role, he was the one answering — not asking — the tough questions.
“If you make a mistake, it’s on the front page of the paper or on the six o’clock news. It lets me tap into the media and still be part of things,” said Burdeniuk.
Being at the centre of microphones and camera lights during his inaugural scrum was as thrilling as his first monumental performance as a 12-year-old, reading the Christmas story in his church pageant.
He spent 2 1/2 years working in the Legislature, inconspicuously navigating its many staircases and dark hallways. He once followed an MLA’s perfume trail when he couldn’t see the way to the cabinet room door.
His disability wasn’t apparent to his colleagues until he needed their help, like in a travel situation.
I could see my future because I could see my mother and my grandfather and I knew what my life was going to be.
(I’ve) had a lot of time to get ready for it. It’s not like this was sudden.
Continued on Page 8
“I put it on my resume that I was visually challenged and they didn’t even pay attention,” said Burdeniuk. He was amazed to find people who didn’t care.
After six years as executive director of communications for Saskatchewan Property Management Corporation, he joined SaskEnergy in 2002.
“He is a real leader for us on the communications,” said Doug Kelln, SaskEnergy president/CEO, “and he does an exceptional job of managing, taking on that (vision) challenge and not letting it get in the way from his commitment to providing the best job he can on a daily basis for SaskEnergy. I just think the most of him. Our job is to enable ... that that challenge can be managed all the time.”
“He loves taking a complicated issue and working with engineers, working with field people, working with the president. It fuels him because he loves a challenge and he finds a way to do it no matter what the challenge is,” said Randa.
As his vision has deteriorated, Burdeniuk’s job execution has changed.
Where he used to go on site in emergencies, now he does most of his work from his office.
“You won’t see me in Nomex,” said Burdeniuk, though he still has emergency gear in a hockey bag in his office.
“When you can’t see what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be out there in an emergency situation.”
Besides, it’s easier to do the job from his computer and land line, which are set up to accommodate his disability, than from his iPhone.
As a straight-A student all through school, Burdeniuk would always wait to study until the night before an exam. His ability to memorize is serving him well in his work today, as he can’t read manuals or take notes on information he’s meant to glean and circulate.
“There’s huge gaps where there’s just nothing,” said Burdeniuk, who guesses he has maybe a year of vision left. “If it would just stop I could get used to it, but it keeps changing. Suddenly I can’t see my office land line phone.”
In high-stress situations — like when a natural gas storehouse fire burns for a week at a cost of $10 million (Prud’homme in October) or when a house explodes (Regina Beach in December) — Burdeniuk works 20-hour days until the situation settles.
They’re challenging times, during which “the optic nerves and the brain just shut down at the end of the day and say, ‘I’ve had it, I can’t handle any more,’ and it’s almost like you’re in a fog.”
It’s almost like it can come and go. You’re fine in bright sunlight; you’re not fine in a dark lobby. Are you faking it? It’s more hidden because people don’t realize there’s something wrong with you.
For all the difficulties surrounding his job — especially in those times he has to work from home in his 24/7 on-call role — “Randa is my eyes.”
Randa Burdeniuk calls it fate. Dave was working at the Albert and Dewdney McDonald’s; she’d applied to work at the Albert North shop, because it was closer to home. But in a rare move, they transferred her application.
“We would work early Saturday mornings together,” said Randa. “He was tall, dark and handsome. He was brilliant and had a great sense of humour.”
“(We) met and fell in love under the golden arches,” said Dave.
From the time they were 17, they felt they were meant to be. “I knew that he was my soulmate,” said Randa. “I knew from the moment that we started dating that I would have this wonderful life with him and that we would be going on this journey together.”
Their first date was Dave’s Grade 12 graduation from Scott Collegiate; they’ve been married 26 years.
Dave’s disability was a consideration from the beginning. He’s always been night blind. He’d pick her up in his half-ton to go out; she’d drop him off after dark and take the truck home. But at the same time, it was never a factor. “I never questioned it because I loved him at that moment, I love him more now than I did then, and I knew that whatever he would have to face, we would face together,” said Randa, herself a former journalist.
“She never has looked at this as a burden on our family or on our relationship. She just says we can do anything together, we can overcome anything together, we can take on any challenge together,” said Dave.
Randa drives him to work and picks him up every day. When he does regular hits with local TV morning shows, she’s right there with him — “mini dates,” they call them. She helps him scout out those aforementioned unfamiliar locations.
People think because you don’t have really thick black glasses on and you don’t have a dog with you, that maybe there’s nothing wrong with you.
At home, as he’s on call 24/7 for work, she helps him read the text on his laptop, which is so much smaller than his office monitor.
“I don’t want to give the impression that it’s always easy because it isn’t,” said Randa. “My heart aches when there’s something that he used to be able to do that he isn’t able to do.”
From the time they were toddlers, their two daughters Trelle (now 24) and Cassia (18) were taught there were certain things their dad couldn’t see and do.
As he did with his own mother, Burdeniuk would take the girls on the bus.
“We would have great adventures,” said Dave, “teaching them how to lead you, how to guide you, and they always took it very, very seriously.”
The family would sometimes accompany him on work trips out of town; they’d visit Dave’s office.
Sometimes they’d even do the work — his daughters would hand out news releases to media on occasion.
Now Trelle is on the other end of that, as a reporter for Saskatoon’s NewsTalk CKOM radio.
“She’s the only reporter who’s ever told me she’s loved me in an interview,” Burdeniuk joked.
The man has a good sense of humour. In part, it’s ingrained.
Working in radio, ever the straight man as a news announcer, he’d write jokes for the DJs who were allowed to have more fun on air.
By the time Weird Al Yankovic came along, Burdeniuk had been writing jokey song lyrics for years.
But wisecracking is also a coping mechanism: His grandfather David told a lot of jokes, Burdeniuk guesses for the same reason he does — to be more at ease with his vision loss.
My heart aches when there’s something that he used to be able to do that he isn’t able to do. — Randa Burdeniuk
Even though cataracts nearly led to complete blindness 10 years ago, he makes light of the surgery that corrected the problem: “I always joke that I went off to a private clinic and came back with implants.”
He lightheartedly approaches day-to-day hurdles — in the office: “If I’m talking to potted plant it’s probably because I think it’s a spikyhaired summer student and I’m having a great conversation”; dealing with media: “There was a spruce tree right beside (the reporter) … and they were both about the same height, so I was pretty sure I was looking in the right direction.”
Realistically, coping is hard and he tries to be strong as he clings to his last bits of sight.
“There’s so many down moments and it doesn’t take a lot sometimes to cry,” said Burdeniuk. “I’ll use humour to try to disarm people’s discomfort.”
For those moments of awkwardness or downright ignorance, he tries to understand and stay cool — like when two TV reporters recently asked whether his white cane was a gas detector, and one confessed blindness had always fascinated him.
“I’m thinking, ‘Well it sure hasn’t fascinated me,’” said Burdeniuk.
He’s dealt with many stereotypes.
Burdeniuk doesn’t golf, let alone golf well, even though there are blind people who do. He doesn’t read braille. People assume his other senses are heightened. Not exactly, though he relies on them more than he once did. He has a “spidey sense” that alerts him to obstacles that might endanger him.
“I can’t hear a butterfly pass gas a mile away or anything like that,” he said, but “sound is everything.”
He used to rely on his sense of smell, but a scent-free workplace makes that device redundant.
Burdeniuk is not a Paralympian; the idea that every blind person is, is as absurd as the stereotypes surrounding Burdeniuk’s profession: “Hollywood has these great conspiracy theories about Wag the Dog and all these other things as to what a PR or communications person can do, which are really far from reality.”
Burdeniuk knows communications: Point a camera in his face and hurl questions at him, and he’s peachy.
His concerns surrounding work are things most people probably wouldn’t consider.
“Can I safely get to the bathroom without tripping over a delivery cart? Can I not embarrass myself by smashing into a guest? My biggest fear is getting from the car to my office or from my office to the lunchroom or from the kitchen area to the bathroom. Those are my challenges.
“I never trip over the same fire hydrant twice, but they really hurt. Initially because I wasn’t using a white cane, people would think you were sick or drunk or something.”
As cautious as he tries to be, he also ventures out of his comfort zone.
“Those things aren’t easy,” said Randa, “but we just hold each other’s hand and we go ‘let’s do this.’”
Last summer, the couple went ziplining in Cypress Hills.
Forty feet above the trees, Dave was the first of the group to hang upside down from the zip line.
“That’s what I love about him, is there’s always this sense of adventure, this sense of fun,” said Randa.
“You have to keep pushing yourself, otherwise it can take you over and everything becomes unsafe and everything becomes scary,” said Burdeniuk.
He does his best to keep blindness from overtaking him.
“If I view it as a ticking time bomb, then I can almost feel the disease and I don’t want to feel my retinas dying.”
He aims to live in the moment and cherish the little things.
When he and Randa are in the car, it’s a given that she pulls over for a sunset, because it could be his last one.
“I work really hard to memorize things that people would take for granted” — the colours of a sunset, grass blowing in the wind, frost on a fence.
“I never go to bed without looking into Randa’s eyes (and) looking at her face, because there will be a time when I won’t be able to see her face. I never want to forget that.”
In July, Burdeniuk walked his daughter Trelle down the aisle; he’s not sure he’ll be able to see to do the same for Cassia one day.
He hopes to one day have grandchildren. “I may not be able to see them, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
“I just try and live but I’m hoping I live a long time. And I’m hoping I have a strong memory as I get very old because I’m going to need that so that somebody can describe to me what the world around me looks like. I guess I’m scared but I’m determined.”
I never go to bed without looking into Randa’s eyes (and) looking at her face, because there will be a time when I won’t be able to see her face. I never want to forget that.