"Mom! Look! There are cracks in the sky!"The life of any Optometrist is filled with "which is better, one or two?" punctuated with an occasional save that is SO spectacular, that just one patient makes your whole career worth him or her alone. There are a handful of these and I can recount them all.
Over the past two weeks, I met young Sara (HIPPA forbids me from giving her real name.) At the age of five, she had never seen her world. Her eyes were so far-sighted that she had never been in focus and her brain had never learned to see. Even at the exam when I put the proper lenses in front of her, she didn't know how to process the suddenly-focused detail--still only seeing 20/400.
Her mom has been back in our office a couple of times already, full of emotion, stunned at the change in her daughter. Yesterday, it was to share the "lightning" story. She is horrified that she used to berate her daughter for being so blind, never sensing that it was the truth. Now in focus, nature takes over and Sara's brain is learning to see things for the first time. Every day, Mom gets to see things for the first time through five year old Sara's eyes. What a gift!
2 comments:
Those times are a certain pay off for all the sacrifice of time and money it takes to become an optometrist. What a blessing for that family to be seeing with new eyes.
I remember watching a movie about a man who was blind from birth who was able to receive his eyesight through surgical intervention. It was an interesting concept as her learned to comprehend 3D objects and then seeing them in a photograph.
Ditto, what a reward!
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