Education
He attended the Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind and later the Young Men’s Christian Association School of Swedish Massage.".
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Shirl Jennings
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Career
"His sickness plunged him into a coma, from which he emerged after two weeks with paralyzed legs and damaged eyesight. When he was 7 or 8, Jennings was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a progressive, untreatable disease of the retina that causes blindness. By the time he was 10, he could distinguish only light from dark.
In 1991, at the urging of his then-girlfriend, Barbara, Shirl visited ophthalmologist Doctor Trevor Woodhams to investigate opportunities to restore his sight.
Woodhams suggested surgery to remove his dense cataracts and to determine the true underlying condition of his retinas. Woodhams believed that the removal of the cataracts would return some of Shirl"s vision.
The surgery did restore some of Shirl Jenning"s vision. However, he was overwhelmed with visual sensory data and was unable to connect what he was seeing with his visual memory, which had all but disappeared.
The family contacted Doctor Oliver Sacks, a famous neurologist known for his book Awakenings, who, along with other physicians, concluded that Shirl would need to relearn how to identify objects that he could feel and smell by using their visual cues.
Shirl"s extraordinary metamorphosis was featured in a 1995 article in The New Yorker magazine, "To See and Not See," by Doctor Sacks. In February 1992, Jennings contracted pneumonia, which led to respiratory failure that deprived his brain of oxygen. After recovering, while he could still see some colors and movement, his sight virtually vanished.
Shirl Jennings died from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in 2003 at the age of 63.
