WHEN CANADIAN ROCKER RANDY

BY APRIL BULMER

Bachman wrote Takin’ Care of Business in 1973 he explored some of the challenges of the average urban worker. But some local entrepreneurs might inspire more moving songs.

Ken Roche, for instance, suffers from an eye disease called inverse retinitis pigmentosa. Legally blind since age nine and functionally blind since 2007, the registered massage therapist takes the MobilityPLUS bus service from his home in Cambridge each morning to work at three Waterloo-based companies: Absolute Rehab, Equitable Life of Canada and Sun Life Financial.

“I can feel how people move. I think about my patient from inside my own body. I am good at what I do,” says Roche from his Preston garden, his new guide dog Gromit, a yellow Labrador retriever, close by.

Now 45, Roche graduated in 1996 with a 96-per-cent average from the Canadian College of Massage and Hydrotherapy in Sutton West, located on the south shores of Lake Simcoe.

“I knew I had to learn it well,” says Roche, who eventually returned to the school as a teaching assistant.

“For me massage therapy is art and science. I like to practise both at the same time.”

On average, Roche gives 1,000 treatments a year. “I have an evolving schedule,” he says. “People come for rehab or temporary relief. Some people come for lifestyle support.”

Roche has also stayed abreast of changes in technology.

“I had to learn the computer — email, text, simple things. Every time technology shifts there is a large learning curve. It took years to learn Facebook. But it is getting better. I make clinical notes and schedules on the computer,” he says.

Roche also has an iPhone with a synthesized voice to tell him what address he is approaching.

“Technology shows a lot of promise for visually impaired and blind people,” he says. “Technology is building accessibility.”

He also hopes to expand his business into hydrotherapy but hasn’t found the facilities yet. Hydrotherapy is the therapeutic use of water in any of its three states — ice, liquid or steam.

“I am good at continuing on,” he says. “I am battered but not beaten.”

Indeed, slim but strong, Roche earned a black belt in karate through Ron Day’s Kitchener Kicks Martial Arts Centre, where he teaches disabled children on Saturday mornings. “It trains the mind, body and spirit,” he says. Roche also challenges himself in winter by skiing with a guide. He is a former member of the Ontario disabled alpine racing team.

“I’ve hit race gates, telephone poles, and once went off a cliff. But I did my own rehab and self care in order to repair injuries.

“I am trying to create a bridge, trying to close the gap between what has been done and what is possible,” he says. “This is very much an able-bodied world, but I have to take my lumps and bumps and get ready for another day. That’s martial arts. That’s life.”

Martin Abu shares a similar philosophy. “Each situation is a challenge. I work my way through it,” he says.

Abu, who immigrated to Canada from Ghana in 1996, suffered from tunnel vision. In 2007, he underwent surgery in a Toronto hospital to correct what was considered glaucoma.

“I signed a consent agreement,” he says. “I was told 99 per cent of the time, the procedure works. Three days later, I became a blind man.”

Abu’s issue was actually thin cornea. “As time goes on pressure in the eye increases and affects the optic nerve,” he says.

“The mistake the doctors made pushed me into blindness. A life-changing mistake could have been avoided. I didn’t get a second opinion.”

But Abu received support from his children, two girls and a boy, who were teenagers at the time.

“They helped me locate things and also helped me on the computer,” he says. “A man from the CNIB (formerly the Canadian National Institute for the Blind), also came. My biggest challenge was to learn to use technology that’s available for people who are visually impaired — understanding it and using it, navigating my way through the computer.”

But now, eight years later and in his mid 60s, Waterloo-based Abu has taken steps to prevent such medical errors from happening to others in the future.

“My focus is computer technology. Health IT,” he says. “Analysis using computer technology and software.”

Abu, who has a background in electrical engineering, hopes to develop a program that will examine the basis of an ailment.

“I will make it specific to the person — how they got it and where they will go from there.”

“Look at, for example, the basis of glaucoma. We need computer equipment that will analyze all the information,” he says. “Eventually it will be a business. Eventually we will work with hospitals or doctors’ offices. Computer engineering can help medicine become very efficient. It can enhance medicine.”

Abu works on his ideas at the CNIB in Waterloo and at the Centre for Sight Enhancement at the Low Vision Clinic, part of the University of Waterloo School of Optometry and Vision Science, using computer programs that read text and talk out loud.

“I use ZoomText and Kurzweil 1000,” he says.