An accident at the age of 12 left Ivan Pivac blind. He went on to train in acupuncture in Hong Kong, and has worked from his practice below his West Auckland home for 50 years. He tells Nicholas Jones why having no vision can be an advantage.
Ivan Pivac’s business is largely word of mouth, but occasionally someone turns up without realising the acupuncturist is blind.
“People are quite astounded … but basically there’s no problem, because they tell me, ‘You wouldn’t be here doing this work if you couldn’t cope with it’.
“There’s only been one chap who admitted afterwards that he was in the waiting room and thought, ‘Hmm, I think I’ll leave’. But he came in, with a very bad problem, and I fixed it.”
More common is for Pivac, 76, to treat someone a few times before they dare ask whether he might have a problem with his vision.
“I say, ‘No, I’m only totally blind’. They think you can see a bit, because you can walk around and do things and so on, but they’re not quite sure how much you can see. But that doesn’t stop them coming back.”
In September Pivac will mark 50 years performing acupuncture from a clinic on the lower storey of his Glendene, Auckland home.
He says he’s treated about 17,000 people over that time. A recent client returned for help with a sore neck, some 40 years after his last appointment.
“A lot of people who turn up I may not have seen for 10 years or more. But they always know that I’m here,” says Pivac.
“Often people ask me, ‘When are you going to retire?’ And the classic response to that is, ‘When the phone stops ringing’. [People] have problems that they have had virtually for decades, and if you can give some relief … then I am quite happy to do it.”
Pivac, one of four siblings, grew up in Matamata, where his dad ran a restaurant and fish shop. When he was 6 the vision in his right eye was damaged and deteriorated over time, after a knock to the head. At 12 a tennis ball struck his other eye, detaching the retina.
He had numerous operations, but ultimately lost all his sight.
“I had been in hospital for three months. After each operation the doctor would say, ‘Don’t lift that bandage up’, and so I wouldn’t lift the bandage up.
“One night [after the fifth surgery], around 10pm, I thought, ‘I’m going to check this out’. So I lifted the bandage up and turned the light above the bed on.”
All he could see was a red-yellow glow.
“I looked at it for about half a minute and I found it quite intriguing, and then I switched the light off, and pulled the bandage down, and I thought to myself, ‘Well, if that’s as good as it gets, then that is how it’s going to be’. And moved on from there.
“There was no psychologist to give emotional support or anything. I certainly didn’t need it … people got on with it. So that was the rehab - 30 seconds, a decision to move on.”
After several months Pivac moved to Auckland, and boarded at a school in Parnell, run by the Royal New Zealand Foundation for the Blind. He embraced learning braille and other skills, and his education generally.
It was a boost to be around, and learn from, other vision-impaired children, he says, including what hobbies they took up. He was young enough to adapt.
“I think if you are going to lose your sight, the age of 12 is most probably the best time,” he now reflects.
“You have gone through childhood and developed so much visual memory, you’ve developed a good sense of colour - and that is still with me today without any problem - and you have also learned spatial awareness.”
At university Pivac studied Spanish, economics and psychology, and won a scholarship to study anatomy and physiotherapy in London in 1969. He and classmates learned using real body parts.
“The attendants [in the morgue] would roll out a leg or an arm, and the professor would teach you the anatomy. We had actual bones we could pick up.”
Other study occurred in hospitals, where Pivac was intrigued by a woman with multiple sclerosis (MS), who had benefited from acupuncture.
Back in New Zealand, he read more about the practice of traditional Chinese medicine, in which hair-thin needles are inserted into the skin at strategic points on the body.
Pivac wrote to the Hong Kong Education Department asking where to train. He explained he was blind, but that he didn’t expect that would be an issue given his knowledge of the body.
He was accepted, but when administrators were actually confronted by a blind Kiwi on the first day of intake, “there was dead silence”.
After some discussion he was permitted to enrol, and soon found his hunch about the vast majority of acupuncture not requiring sight was correct.
“There are lots of occupations that can be better done without sight, and acupuncture is one of them. My knowledge of anatomy was very good. So when someone comes along and they have a pain in their back, wherever it is, generally they can lie down and I’ll put my hand straight on it, just as if you’ve got X-ray fingers.”
When he returned home he was one of only four acupuncturists in New Zealand. He worked long hours into the evenings, and wasn’t interrupted even during the frequent power cuts of the 1980s.
“I would carry on doing the work as if the lights were still there, and I’d usually forget, [and say] ‘Okay, the treatment is finished, you can put your shoes on now’. ‘Oh, I don’t know where my shoes are’. It was really quite an advantage.”
Acupuncture was once a traditional occupation for vision-impaired people in Japan, Pivac says, but he has only had contact with two other blind acupuncturists, women in Japan and the United States.
A great pleasure of the work is talking to people and finding out about their lives. Pivac can recall details from these conversations, even if the person hasn’t been back in decades.
Jason, the Herald photographer and a past client, can attest to this. Pivac easily recalls not only the suburb he lives in, but the street name, and asks about his wife and daughters.
“I always say to people that if I wasn’t an acupuncturist I’d be a detective. I remember all the criminals and their records, and who they knew and what they’d robbed, and everything,” Pivac says.
“It is likewise with people; somebody might ring up I may not have spoken with, 20, 30 years, and it is instant recall. I don’t know why, I just collect all this sort of information - it goes in and stays there.”
Pivac’s curiosity and zest for life is also reflected in his hobbies and lifelong commitment to learning - he’s a great fan of podcasts, has researched the economic history of Northland’s kauri gum industry, and on the wall of his office are degrees, including a Bachelor of Business (done as an extramural student) and a Master of Commerce.
For many years he ran a company, Zabonne Holdings, that imported technology products for people with special needs, such as electronic devices that give voices to people who can’t talk themselves.
Pivac would travel the country giving seminars to hospitals and other centres, and opening a large suitcase to demonstrate some of the 1600 products available.
“There really weren’t any blind travelling salesmen around, so it was very unusual.”
Advancing technology benefits his own life. When he studied Spanish at university there were no resources in braille, and he relied on his mother, Frances, to look up words in the dictionary and write them down in braille, along with the assigned exercises.
“Now, each night I read Spanish newspapers for about an hour, in Spanish. I read them with a braille display - whatever print comes up on the computer screen, it now comes out in braille for me. If there’s a word there I don’t know I’ll just type that word in … and get the translation straight away.
“It is pretty amazing, going from a point of view where there was no information, today there’s an overload. And it is just so great.”
Pivac is also a stalwart of the Dalmatian Cultural Society’s tamburica group (he has Croatian heritage on both sides) and is an amateur radio enthusiast - an extendable telescopic tilt-over tower in his back garden rises to about 12 metres (and higher if wanted).
“Being on top of a hill, if you’re standing on the back balcony you look all over Auckland, and on a clear day down to the Coromandel and up to Tiritiri [Matangi] lighthouse. There’s no obstruction.”
He met Karen, his partner of 17 years, at Toastmasters. They enjoy cooking, gardening and travelling together.
“All the exploration of cities that we do is on foot … Karen will say, ‘Oh, feel this stone wall, this is unusual. Or the bark or leaves on this tree’. We are walking down cobble streets, and there are the smells of different places. So I come away with very strong impressions.”
People often ask Pivac if his other senses are sharper.
“Obviously, yes. When you think about what you do in your daily life, some 90% of all your information that you take in and respond to is visual. That 90%, for me, is split between other senses. Touch, for example, smell, the vibrations when you are walking down the street, the sun on your face, wind currents, hearing - all of those senses give you that information.
“You are actually thinking differently. I will have a different logic to you, simply because your behaviour is based on visual cues, and my behaviour in the same situation would be based on the cues from those other senses.
“We might still achieve the same outcome, but the way you and I do it is different. It is not that you don’t have these senses, it’s the mere fact that you don’t have to use them.”
That is a loss, he says.
“Imagine how much more meaningful your environment would be if you didn’t rely on sight so much. It would be quite astounding.”
Nicholas Jones is an investigative reporter at the Herald. He was a finalist for Reporter of the Year at the 2024 Voyager Media Awards, and has won numerous national media awards for his reporting and feature writing.