Meet Ismael: Using His Voice for Change and a Better Future

Izzy never planned to become an advocate. In his twenties, he was just trying to survive. Before the blindness, before the speeches, before the long drives across South Dakota to sit in front of lawmakers, he was a chef with burned forearms, tired feet, and a body running on too little sleep and too much determination.

He had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as a baby, so insulin was as natural to him as breathing. He grew up knowing it kept him alive. It wasn’t optional. It wasn’t something you could stretch or skip. But life in his twenties didn’t follow those rules.

He worked in kitchens where the heat never let up with ovens blasting, fryers hissing, pans clanging. He loved the rhythm of it, the pressure, the way everything came together in chaos. He loved feeding people. It made him feel like he had purpose. What he didn’t love was the paycheck.

Cooking paid enough, barely. Enough for rent most months, enough for groceries if he was careful, enough for gas if nothing went wrong. But it didn’t cover what diabetes demanded Insulin was about $300 a vial. And for Izzy, that wasn’t a monthly cost. It was a weekly one. There was no real insurance safety net. What was available was too expensive or didn’t cover enough to matter. So he started doing the math that no one should ever have to do. If he delayed rent, he could afford insulin. If he skipped replacing something he needed, maybe another vial. If he just stretched what he had, maybe just a little, he could make it to the next paycheck.

At first, he convinced himself it was temporary, that he was in control, that he knew his body well enough to manage. He started taking less insulin than he needed, guessing doses, waiting longer between refills. He learned how to push through the headaches, the exhaustion, the constant thirst. In a kitchen, there wasn’t space for weakness. Orders had to go out. No one cared if your blood sugar was high. But his body kept score.

At twenty-eight, everything changed. That was the year he met Heather. It wasn’t slow. It wasn’t cautious. It was immediate and real in a way that made both of them stop pretending they had time to waste. They met, and something clicked, not perfection, but recognition. Two months later, they were married. People told them it was too fast. They didn’t listen.

Two months after their wedding, the cracks began to show with blurry vision, missed details, numbers that wouldn’t focus. Izzy told himself it was exhaustion. But he knew. Heather knew too. When he finally told her about rationing insulin, she didn’t blame him. “This isn’t you failing,” she said. “This is a system failing you.” He wanted to believe that. But the damage had already started. Doctors said words he didn’t want to hear: retinopathy, progression, permanent.

Six months after their wedding, Izzy went blind. Not all at once, but steadily, until there was nothing left to see. He stopped driving. He stopped working in kitchens. He learned to navigate a world that suddenly didn’t match the one he remembered.

That first year of being blind was the hardest. It wasn’t just about losing sight, it was about losing identity, losing independence, losing the life he thought he was building. He fell into a dark place, one he didn’t know how to climb out of. Heather was the one who pulled him back. She refused to let him stay there. She sat with him in the silence, in the frustration, in the anger and then she pushed him forward. “There has to be resources out there,” she told him.

That belief led him to the Lighthouse for the Blind of Southwest Florida. There, for the first time since losing his vision, he began to see a path forward again just not with his eyes. He learned skills, built confidence, and connected with the idea that blindness didn’t mean the end of independence, it just meant learning a different way.

Eventually, he and Heather made the decision to move to South Dakota. It was another fresh start, but this time, he wasn’t starting from nothing. He trained at the Rehabilitation Center for the Blind. That’s where he found woodworking. At first, it sounded impossible. Working with saws, blades, measurements, and fine detail without sight. But step by step, piece by piece, he learned. He learned to measure by touch, to listen to the sound of tools, to trust his hands, and to build. And through that process, something else came back too, purpose.

From that training, Izzy went on to open his own business: Blind Guy Boards LLC. What started as rebuilding his life turned into creating something of his own, something tangible, something meaningful, something that proved to himself and others that blindness didn’t define his limits.

By the time he was thirty-one, Izzy and Heather’s life had found a rhythm again. That same year, their daughter was born. She was everything. Izzy learned her through sound and touch, the rhythm of her breathing, the way her small hands held onto him, the way her laugh filled a room. For three years, she was just their joy.

Then came the signs. And then came the diagnosis: type 1 diabetes. She was three years old. That moment didn’t just hurt, it changed something in Izzy. Now, everything he had gone through wasn’t just his story anymore. It was hers.

But the shift toward advocacy had already begun quietly, before that moment. It started when Izzy found the National Federation of the Blind. At first, it was just a place to learn, to connect, and to understand how to live as a blind person without limits placed on him by others. But what he found there was more than resources, it was belief. Belief that blindness didn’t have to define his future, belief that systems could change, belief that his voice mattered.

He became more involved, more present, and eventually stepped into leadership becoming the president of the National Federation of the Blind of South Dakota. And it was in that role that he made his first trip to Washington, DC. At the time, there were serious threats to defund programs administered by the U.S. Department of Education including vocational rehabilitation programs that had helped Izzy rebuild his life through self-employment. So he went not just as someone learning to advocate, but as a leader. He walked the halls of Congress. He sat in meetings. He told his story, not polished, not perfect, but real. He spoke about what those programs meant and how they gave blind people a path to independence, to work, to dignity. How without them, people like him wouldn’t have the chance to rebuild after losing everything. That trip deepened something in him. He saw clearly that his experiences, his struggles, his losses, and his rebuilding weren’t just personal. They were evidence. They were power.

From there, he kept going. He became more vocal, more determined. He worked on issues affecting the blind community at every federal, state, and local level. He spoke up about access, employment, technology, and independence. And all the while, in the background, another fight was building. His daughter, her diabetes, the cost of insulin, and the lack of accessibility in medical technology. He hadn’t fully stepped into that advocacy yet, but it was coming. Because now, it wasn’t just about what had happened to him. It was about what could happen to her.

Izzy never planned to become an advocate. But through his life, every challenge, every loss, and every moment kept pushing him in that direction. He hadn’t chosen rationing. He hadn’t chosen blindness. He hadn’t chosen the cost of insulin. He hadn’t chosen his daughter’s diagnosis. But he was choosing what came next: to speak, to lead, to build something better. And step by step, he was becoming the voice he once needed, so that one day, his daughter might not have to tell the same story.