"I was always
happy I tried."
CIA analyst
Mike May liked being a "human guided missile." That's why he won the
world record for downhill speed skiing. As a boy, he climbed a 175-foot tall
radio tower with no safety gear. Then his mother let him build an 80-foot
antenna in the backyard.
After
college, Hay lived in a remote village in Ghana for six months working as a
laborer hauling buckets of dirt. He invented a portable GPS system when the
technology was new, and he helped invent the world's first laser turntable. He
also starred in a play for six weeks.
When he was
in elementary school, he was a safety crossing guard. He rode a bicycle for
three miles. He played baseball, tetherball, and kickball, and he rode a
pogo-stick and had a skateboard.
Such things
are not so unusual. May, however, had been blind since he was three. He wanted
to make mud pies in his parents' garage. He needed a jar, and he found one
filled with a hardened powder. It was calcium carbide. When he washed it out,
the water and the powder combined, creating an explosive gas—acetylene.
Chemical burns horribly scarred his corneas, the transparent part of the eyes in
front of the iris and pupils.
A Chance at Bat
Growing up,
he let nothing stop him. When he played baseball, he might run into a tree
instead of first base, but he didn't care. He wanted his chance at bat. The
play he starred in was "Butterflies Are Free," the story of a blind
man trying to leave home. He commanded the stage with such abandon some in the
audience feared he might topple into the orchestra pit.
"Sometimes
I got bloody," May told Robert Kurson, the author of the book "Crashing
Through" which tells his life story. "Sometimes I ended up on big
adventures. But no matter what happened, I was always happy I tried….
May didn't want to sit around his whole life
wondering what might have happened if he tried something. He tried it. Even
when he lost his left eye to infection as a young man, he kept going forward
into the unknown and new adventures.
One day
when he was 45, he began his greatest adventure. On a lark, he sat in an
optometrist's chair. "I think you're going to find that I'm blind,"
May told the doctor.
The
optometrist couldn't argue with that, and he asked May if he would like to see
his partner, Dan Goodman, an ophthalmologist. After examining May's eye,
Goodman said, "I think we can make you see."
And that is
what Dr. Goodman did—he let May see again. He performed an experimental corneal
epithelial stem cell transplant. The surgery grafted a ring of cells one-third
of a millimeter thick around the perimeter of the cornea. After growing
securely into place, they birthed new cells. A second operation then attached a
transplanted cornea to the healthy outer ring.
May had
many good reasons not to have the operations. The procedure had a 50 percent
failure rate. His new vision, if any, might not last. Worse, he would be taking
a dangerous anti-transplant rejection drug that could cause liver failure,
kidney failure, and cancer.
May also
wondered—did he really need vision to see? He knew he was married to a
beautiful woman. He knew he had two beautiful sons. He always "saw"
them perfectly well. In the final analysis, however, in May's mind—as always—"Curiosity
outweigh[ed] a mountain of reasons not to do it."
The Pain Was Shattering
When the
bandages came off, the first face he saw was that of his wife. He saw her blond
hair, her blue sweater, her face, her lips, and later he saw all of her, and
when they made love, he looked into her eyes.
He saw his
80-year-old mother for the first time in 42 years. When he noticed—for the
first time—that one of his sons had freckles, his wife cried.
At first, he
could only see things one at a time as though he were looking at photographs. His
vision quickly improved, allowing him to play catch with his other son.
But as with
other patients who have regained vision, he suffered from prosopagnosia, difficulty
interpreting the world visually. He would never be able to drive or read. The
portions of his brain that processed such visual activity never developed
during his childhood.
When his
body tried to reject the transplant, May endured a series of horrifically
painful injections directly into the cornea. Putting medicine inside the eye
was the only way to save it. Each time, he could see the gleaming needle coming
at his eye, and each time the pain was shattering.
May's
spirit wouldn't allow his body to give in to possibility of failure. The
treatment worked, and his body's attempt to reject the transplant ended.
When he was
a teenager, he worked as a camp counselor. Of course, the younger boys asked
him for life advice. Fittingly, he replied, "Have adventures. Speak to
your curiosity. Be willing to fall down or to get lost. There's always a way."
MORAL: See what you
can do!
No comments:
Post a Comment