Ivan Pivac lost his sight in an accident when he was 12, then trained in acupuncture in Hong Kong and has been practising the practice for 50 years from a clinic in the basement of his west Auckland home.
He tells Nicholas Jones why being blind is an advantage.
Ivan Pivac’s business relies mainly on word of mouth, with some patients coming to his clinic unaware that the acupuncturist is blind.
“People are very surprised… but basically it’s OK, because they tell me, ‘If you couldn’t handle this, you wouldn’t be here doing this job.'”
“Only one person later admitted that he sat in the waiting room thinking, ‘Hmm, maybe I should just go home.’ But he came in with a terrible problem, and I solved it.”
For Pivac, 76, it’s common to treat a patient several times before daring to ask if they have a vision problem.
“I say, ‘No, you’re just completely blind.’ They think you can see a little bit because you can walk around and do things, but they’re not really sure how much you can see. But that doesn’t stop them from coming back.”
In September, Pivac will mark 50 years of providing acupuncture treatments from a clinic downstairs from her Glendene home in Oakland.
He says he has treated about 17,000 people in that time, and recently one patient returned seeking treatment for neck pain, though it had been about 40 years since his last appointment.
“A lot of the people who come, I haven’t seen them in over 10 years, but they always know I’m here,” Pivac says.
“People often ask me, ‘When are you going to retire?’ and the typical answer is, ‘When the phone stops ringing.’ [People] They’ve had problems for decades, and if you can address some of those issues, I’d be happy to do that.”
One of four children, Pivac grew up in Matamata, where his father ran a restaurant and fishmonger’s. At the age of six, a head injury damaged the vision in his right eye, which worsened over time. At age 12, a tennis ball hit him in the other eye, causing a detached retina.
He underwent multiple surgeries but eventually lost his sight completely.
“I was in hospital for three months. After every operation the doctor would say, ‘Don’t take off your bandages,’ so I tried not to take them off.
“One night [after the fifth surgery]At about 10 p.m., I thought, ‘Let me just take a look.’ So I lifted the bandage and turned on the light above my bed.”
All he could see was a red-yellow light.
“I looked at it for about 30 seconds and thought it was really interesting, so I turned the light off and took the bandage down, and I thought, ‘Well, if this is the best thing to do, this is the way to go,’ and I just went from there.”
“There was no psychologist to give me emotional support. Of course I didn’t need one. Everyone accepted it. That was rehab. You have 30 seconds to make the decision to move on.”
A few months later, Pivac moved to Auckland and boarded at the Royal New Zealand Foundation for the Blind in Parnell, where he was dedicated to learning Braille and other skills, and to his education in general.
He said it was encouraging to spend time with other blind kids and learn from them, including what hobbies they had. He was young enough to adapt.
“I think 12 years old is probably the best time to lose your vision,” he recalls now.
“You grew up developing a visual memory and a good sense of color, which is still there today. You also learned spatial awareness.”
At university, Pivac studied Spanish, economics and psychology, and in 1969 won a scholarship to study anatomy and physiotherapy in London, where he and his classmates learned using actual body parts.
“The officials [in the morgue] We stretched out our legs and arms, and the professors taught us anatomy. We could actually pick up the bones.”
The other study took place in a hospital, and Pivac was intrigued by the women with multiple sclerosis (MS) who benefited from acupuncture.
Returning to New Zealand, he learned more about the traditional Chinese medicine treatment, which involves inserting hair-thin needles into the skin at key points on the body.
Pivac wrote to Hong Kong’s Ministry of Education asking where he could get training. He explained that he was blind, but said he didn’t think that would be a problem, given his knowledge of the body.
He was accepted, but when administrators actually met the blind New Zealander on his first day at school, “there was complete silence”.
After some discussion, he was admitted and soon found that his hunch was correct that the majority of acupuncture treatments do not require vision.
“There are many jobs you can do without seeing, and acupuncture is one of them. My knowledge of anatomy was very extensive, so if there was a pain in a part of the back, I would usually have the patient lie down and I would place my hands on that part, like the fingers on an X-ray.”
On his return he became one of only four acupuncturists in New Zealand, working long hours into the night and uninterrupted even during the frequent power cuts of the 1980s.
“I carried on working as if the light was still there and mostly forgot. [and say] “‘OK, your treatment is over. Please put your shoes on now.’ ‘Oh no, I don’t know where my shoes are.’ It was a great help.”
Pivac said acupuncture was once a traditional profession for the visually impaired in Japan, but he had only ever met two blind acupuncturists – women, one in Japan and one in the United States.
A great joy of the job is talking to people and learning about their lives, and Pivac can recall the details of these conversations even if the person has not returned for decades.
Jason, Herald Pivac, a photographer and former client, can attest to this: He easily remembers not only the suburb in which he lives but also the name of the street and asks about his wife and daughters.
“I always tell people that if I wasn’t an acupuncturist I would be a detective. I remember all the criminals and their histories, who they knew, what they stole, everything,” Pivac said.
“It’s the same with people. Someone I haven’t spoken to in 20 or 30 years will call me and I’ll remember them right away. I don’t know why, but I collect all this information. It stays in my head.”
Pivac’s curiosity and passion for life is reflected in his hobbies and commitment to lifelong learning: he’s a big podcast fan, he’s studied the economic history of Northland’s kauri rubber industry, and his degrees, including a Bachelor of Business (completed as an external student) and a Master of Commerce, hang on the walls of his office.
For many years he ran Zabonne Holdings, a company that imported technology products for people with special needs, including electronic devices that give a voice to those who cannot speak.
Pivac traveled around the country giving seminars at hospitals and other centers, opening large suitcases to demonstrate some of his 1,600 products.
“There weren’t really any blind traveling salesmen around, so it was quite unusual.”
Technological advances have also helped him in his own life: When he was studying Spanish in college, there were no Braille materials available, so he relied on his mother, Frances, to look up words in the dictionary, transcribe them in Braille, and help him practice assignments.
“Now I read the Spanish newspapers in Spanish every night for about an hour. I read using a braille display, which displays the text on my computer screen in braille. If there’s a word I don’t know, I just type it in… and the translation appears instantly.”
“It’s really amazing to go from a time when there was absolutely no information to now having an abundance of information. It’s really amazing.”
Pivac is also an enthusiastic supporter of the Tamburika group of the Dalmatian Cultural Association (he is of Croatian descent) and a ham radio enthusiast, whose retractable tilt-over tower in his backyard stretches to a height of about 12 metres (and can grow higher if he so wishes).
“It’s on top of a hill so when you stand on the back balcony you can see all of Auckland and on a clear day you can see all the way to the Coromandel Peninsula and Tiritiri. [Matangi] “The lighthouse. No obstructions.”
He met his partner of 17 years, Karen, at Toastmasters, and the two enjoy cooking, gardening and traveling together.
“All the urban exploration we do is on foot. Karen says, ‘Oh, feel this stone wall, that’s unusual, and the bark and leaves of this tree’. We’re walking along cobblestone streets and taking in the smells of different places. So I come away with very strong impressions.”
Pivac is often asked if his other senses have become heightened as well.
“Of course it is. If you think about what you do in your daily life, about 90% of the information you receive and react to is visual. For me, that 90% is distributed across the other senses: touch, smell, vibrations as you walk down the street, the sun on your face, the wind blowing, hearing – all these senses give you information.
“You actually think differently. You have a different logic than you. And that’s simply because your behavior is based on visual cues, and my behavior in the same situation is based on cues from my other senses.
“We may achieve the same result, but the way you and I achieve it is different. It’s not that we don’t have these senses, we just don’t need to use them.”
That’s a loss, he says.
“Imagine how much more meaningful your surroundings would be if you were less reliant on your sense of sight. It’s quite amazing.”
Nicholas Jones is HeraldHe was named 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.
