How Optometry Changed My Life

Imagine milking a cow while having blurry vision. Where is the pail? Did you miss it or kick it over? Now imagine working on a farm and living your life with blurry vision and no hope for change.

This past summer, I had the opportunity to visit Romania and join an optometry team in various pop-up optometry clinics in two different villages. While I was there, I learned that eyesight played an important role to the people in those villages because their daily tasks involved a lot of physical labor such as harvesting food and taking care of cattle. It was life changing to see how something as small as eye drops or a pair of glasses were able to drastically change someone’s life. My team and I helped transport over 10,000 pairs of glasses as …show more content…
Ariella was born with a lazy eye, and most people would not understand the impact that it has had on her everyday life. Since I babysat Ariella from infancy, I have firsthand experience in understanding how impactful her lazy eye has been. The enjoyment every child should be able to experience was sapped away from her because the headaches her lazy eye would give her. When I took Ariella in for her optometry appointments I saw the ins and outs of how optometry worked and was blown away. This was the first spark that ignited my passion to study …show more content…
On a more personal level, I had to bring my grandmother to the optometry clinic and watch as she explained to the optometrist that she needed a prescription that would prevent her from tripping and falling due to her impaired vision. Seeing how poor vision impacted the seniors and my grandma drove me to want to be challenged every day in finding a solution that could help their eyesight and improve the quality of their daily