Sometimes, life throws a curve ball. Strangely, many of the curve balls in Todd Osment’s life have hit him in the left eye.
“I was nine years old the first time the eye was injured,” says Osment, now 56. “A classmate shot a pencil at me with a rubber band.” That was also the first time Osment made the 45-mile trip from his home in Monroe, Michigan, to the Kellogg Eye Center where a surgeon was able to save the eye, but not its vision. This is the story of how, 47 years later, he is able to see in that eye.
After his injury Osment would rely solely on his right eye for the next 20 years. As he got older, he became more aware of images in his left eye and—after surgery to implant an intraocular lens—he saw slightly better.
In 2012, Osment would suffer yet another injury to his left eye. While clearing tree branches in his yard after a storm, a branch struck Osment under the safety glasses he was wearing, rupturing his left globe.
Doctors at the hospital near his home in Adrian, Michigan, determined that the injury was too severe to be managed there. Arrangements were made for a Kellogg surgical team to perform an emergency procedure to reconstruct the globe. After his eye healed, Maria Woodward, M.D., M.S., a corneal specialist who has helped care for Osment at Kellogg, performed a cornea transplant.