As a teenager, Cheryl Godley did what most teenagers do: study, go to movies, drive around town.

That changed at 17 when she began losing her vision.

In two weeks, Godley went from seeing perfectly to being visually handicapped.

A rare retinal disease - Stargardt's maculopathy - had affected Godley's central vision. She was legally blind within a year.

"At that time, it was necessary for me to learn orientation and mobility, cane instruction, marking my clothes, cooking as a blind person, those kinds of things," Godley said Saturday at a convention of the Wyoming Council of the Blind.

She also learned Braille - not an easy task for people who are used to being visual or auditory learners.

It was a hard hit for a high school senior with plans to attend Colorado College as a pre-med major in chemistry,

Instead, Godley decided upon a new major and left for Colorado State University to pursue music therapy.

"I enjoy people and was heavily into piano performance at the time, so I thought I would mix the two," she said.

Receiving her bachelor's degree in 1981, she did an internship, then worked in Colorado Springs for a few years before going to the University of Miami to teach and earn her first master's degree.

That, Godley said, is when she decided to be a psychologist.

"I was doing a lot of research and was always going back to my psych literature, so it made a whole lot more sense to go into that," she said. "It was a very versatile sort of degree that really worked for me."

She got married in 1986, to a rancher she met during her first week of college.

"He was a piano major and the way we really got to know each other is he would do some reading for me," she said, "and we got to know each other very well and became close friends that way."

In 1988, she returned to Colorado State University to earn a second master's degree and, finally, to get her doctoral degree, something she always knew she wanted to do.

Now, Godley runs a private practice in Casper and teaches a class at Casper College.

Because she still has some peripheral vision, her notes consist of large, bold words that she uses as reminders during her lectures.

"I'm not actually reading anything. I'm using a lot of my memory and my cognitive maps. I'm fortunate because I saw up until the age of 17, so I have good maps in my mind to put things together," she said. "It's sometimes inaccurate, but it certainly helps me tremendously in terms of getting information from my environment and trying to put it together and guessing what it is."

Godley and her husband go back and forth between their home in Casper and their ranch just north of Kaycee. They live and work with a service dog, Reece, a yellow labrador.

Contact reporter Megan Lee at (307) 266-0589 or megan.lee@trib.com

Breakout: Wyoming Council of the Blind convention

Cheryl Godley spoke about grief stemming from sight loss at the Wyoming Council of the Blind convention at Highland Park Church on Saturday.

"There's an affinity I feel towards the people from the American Council for the blind," she said. "All of these people are dealing with their own loss in sight. I have dealt with that myself, so we have a lot in common that way. If I can share any information that may be helpful to them, I will."

The convention also included presentations by Casper vice mayor Kenyne Schlager, Rep. Mary Meyer Gilmore, D-Casper, Sen. Charles Scott, R-Casper, and Dr. Ken Morse.