MANSFIELD – What is the cost of giving a little girl the gift of sight?
As it turns out, around $10,000.
That’s how much a pair of eSight glasses would cost for 7-year-old Remington Hedrick, an upcoming second-grader at St. Peter’s School in Mansfield, glasses that would allow her to recognize her parents’ faces, or sit on the couch with her family during movie nights.
Someday soon, Remington might receive those glasses with the help of a very special classmate.
One of Remington’s friends at St. Peter’s is Lizzy Myers, the girl who gained international attention last year when she fulfilled a “visual bucket list” wish and met Pope Francis. Lizzy has a rare genetic disorder called Usher syndrome type 2 that requires her to wear a hearing aid, and will eventually cause her to lose her sight as she approaches adolescence.
Lizzy’s parents, Christine and Steven, created The Visual Bucket List Foundation after their trip to Rome last year as a way to pay it forward to other families with children who are visually impaired. Meeting Remington and her family through Lizzy’s class at St. Peter’s was a fortunate twist of fate.
“I truly believe God has had His hand in a lot of things,” said Christine Myers.
In fact, it was Christine who first discovered the eSight glasses while scrolling through Facebook late one evening. She immediately thought of Remington when she realized the eSight can help with two conditions that Remington has: nystagmus, which causes the eyes to make repetitive uncontrolled movements, and retinal dystrophy, which affects her sensitivity to light.
Remington’s mother, Amber Hedrick, said her daughter had a few different health issues when she was born, but first started developing nystagmus symptoms at 7 weeks old.
“Overnight her eyes started shaking rapidly back and forth,” Hedrick recalled. “One specialist said she would never see, another said it wouldn’t affect her vision, and one even said she would grow out of it.”
Amber and her husband Shane decided to be aggressive in treating Remington’s condition. She had her first eye surgery at seven months old, after which she made eye contact with Amber for the first time. A second surgery came at 18 months old, plus patching, eye drops and other therapies.
“It was hard as a parent, putting your child through that, but looking back and knowing she shouldn’t see as well as she does now, it was a good choice,” Amber said.
Being born with visual impairments, Remington has learned to accommodate for her vision. Walking into a room, one would never know she has visual impairments – except for her pink cane and pink tinted glasses.
“It’s been a rollercoaster,” Amber said. “But Remington is pretty awesome, and with her personality she’ll get through anything life throws at her. Considering she’s a girl that was never really supposed to see, I think she does pretty alright.”
Once Remington approached school age, the Hedricks picked St. Peter’s School due to their small class sizes and tight-knit community – plus the fact that Remington’s older brother Blade would be around to keep an eye on her. That’s where the Hedricks met the Myers, when Remington and Lizzy were put in the same kindergarten class.
Remington’s condition differs from Lizzy’s in that Lizzy’s is degenerative and will worsen as she gets older; Remington’s vision will likely remain the same over time. She has trouble seeing things at a distance, has little to no depth perception, and has significant color deficiencies.
“Eye strain is huge with nystagmus; in the mornings you might not see her eye movement but after lunch or towards the end of the day her eye movement picks up, the eye strain and headaches are very significant,” said Shane Hedrick. “We’ve always tried to stress with the teachers, you don’t see how much work goes into what she does every day because she doesn’t complain.”
The eSight glasses would change all of that:
“I was scrolling through Facebook late one night, and an advertisement came up about helping the blind see,” said Christine Myers. “One of the conditions they’d had success with was nystagmus, which we knew that Remington had. I went to bed because it was way late, and the next day Steve found out the company was in Cleveland for the next week and had seven appointment openings.”
Immediately, the Myers were on the phone with the Hedricks to fill out the necessary paperwork for the company to see Remington. Driving up to Cleveland the day of the appointment, the entire family’s stomachs were in knots.
“I don’t think we slept the night before,” Amber said. “I don’t think Remington slept, either. She had seen the videos on it and saw the results people had, and she wanted them, but I think Blade even told her not to get her hopes up. For some people it just simply doesn’t work.”
But the moment Remington tried on the eSight glasses, her world became clearer. She could read text without bringing the page up to her nose. And she could clearly see her parents’ faces for the first time.
“It made my parents bigger,” Remington recalled. “I got to look out the window and see trucks and cars and a building.”
“The eSight will zoom for her, it will magnify everything she wants to see, it can change the contrast for her, and they allow her to take a picture or video so she can replay her experiences the next day,” Amber explained. “She’s never been able to sit on the couch and watch TV, she pulls a chair up and her knees are on the entertainment center.”
From that moment, the Myers were committed to getting Remington these glasses through their Visual Bucket List Foundation.
“We figured we could give thousands of memorable experiences to Remington by being able to get these glasses for her,” said Steven Myers. “If it wasn’t for others stepping in and working for us, we wouldn’t have had that amazing experience for Lizzy. We feel that we owe something back to others, and it’s going to be something we can never repay, but this is just an effort to do that.”
Raising the funds for Remington’s glasses is no small task, as the eSight glasses run around $10,000. But according to Steven, it’s a small price to pay to give Remington years of sight. Especially sights at the zoo.
“I want to feed the giraffes, and see them, too,” Remington said.
It’s a simple request from a 7-year-old. She’s never been able to see the giraffes at the zoo, as they’ve always been too far away. She wants to enjoy her favorite normal kid activities like swimming, running, or going to the playground.
For her parents, they just want Remington to feel like a normal second grader.
“The last thing we’ve ever wanted in her life was for her to feel different, but when they get school-aged and they see and hear what their friends can do, it becomes very apparent,” Amber said. “We try not to make a big deal out of the little things and focus on the positives, but we want to give her more of those positives.”
The Myers are currently working to raise funds through the Visual Bucket Foundation for Remington’s eSight glasses. There will be a Paint Party fundraiser on Sept. 17 where all proceeds go toward helping Remington.
“Everything we make is going to Remington until she gets those glasses,” Christine Myers said. “From that point on, any extra we have is going to the Foundation. Maybe there’s another child that these will help for, or maybe there’s a child we can make a visual memory for. But if we have to drain the entire account to get these glasses, we’re going to do it.”
For the Hedricks, accepting help is a difficult thing to do. But if it raises awareness about the technology available for visually impaired people – and most importantly, helps their fearless daughter to see – it’s worth it.
“Remington loves life, and she’s really taught us to just stop and appreciate the small things, because we get so caught up in everything else, and Remington has really made us stop and appreciate what we do have,” Amber said.
“Sometimes I’ll stomp my feet and say life isn’t fair, and my husband says no, it’s not. But it’s our life, and it’s pretty awesome.”
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