Photo by: afb1921
I recently came across a real-life story that sounds as though it sprang from the imagination of a Hollywood screenwriter.
It’s the saga of Mike May, who was blinded at the age of three years old in a freak accident. Despite his disability, he lived a life of incredible accomplishment. He worked for the CIA, excelled in business and in sports (including becoming a champion skier and setting a world-record speed record for a blind skier—65 mph!), traveled the world and raised a family.
In 1999, at the age of 46, long after he had given up on the idea of ever seeing again, a chance encounter with a very supportive ophthalmologist presented him with the opportunity to undergo an extremely risky stem-cell treatment that held the promise of partially restoring his vision
In addition to the risks associated with the treatment, history was against Mike. At the time of his surgery there had been fewer than 100 reports of people gaining vision after a lifetime of blindness. And those accounts were not all positive—adjusting to having vision after a lifetime without it can be enormously challenging.
But Mike risked the surgery, and it worked. He was able to see his wife and children for the first time as soon as his bandages came off, and play catch with his kids just a short time later.
But although he was profoundly grateful to save his sight back, Mike faced new challenges after it was restored. For instance, he was an expert blind skier—but he was back to being something of a novice once he had to process all of the visual information coming his way. In a CBS News interview several years after his operation, Mike discussed some of the issues he faced after the operation, which also included an inability to recognize faces, something doctors attributed to the withering of the visual pathways to the brain during four decades of blindness.
Mike is now the president of The Sendero Group, a company that develops technology to enhance the mobility of the visually impaired. On the Sendero Group website, a page is devoted to photographs of Mike—including shots of his bandages being removed after surgery and his first glimpses of his family.
If you want the full, inspiring story, it’s told in “Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See,” by Robert Kurson. A film version of the book is in development, according to the Sendero website.
