SALEM, Ore. — Alexander Miller started wearing glasses at age 3, but his vision loss was so severe that doctors told him he eventually would go blind.
When he last had his eyes examined five years ago, he was told he would be legally blind in five to seven years.
That prognosis turned out not to be true.
Now 30, Miller this summer got the correct prescription that has restored his eyesight to near normal.
Miller is extremely nearsighted — he can see only about 6 inches in front of his face without glasses — and has an astigmatism, which blurs vision. He compares is his vision without glasses to being in the mirror maze in a carnival fun house:
“You bump into walls a lot,” Miller said. “And even though you might be able to see a shape over there, you can’t get to it because you can’t find your way over to it because you keep hitting walls. (My vision is) kind of like that, but with a fog machine or a smoke machine flooding that place, too, making it extra hard to see cause it’s just foggy. It’s fuzzy.”
Experts recommend annual eye exams, but until this summer Miller had worn the same pair of glasses for five years. The lenses were deeply scratched and pitted. Because Miller can see only close things clearly, those flaws were difficult to ignore.
With his old glasses, Miller couldn’t read past the top two lines on an eye exam chart — and the first line of the chart is one giant letter.
In June, one of his lenses fell out while he was swimming in the Little North Santiam River. He couldn’t afford to replace it. He was living on Supplemental Security Income and had recently started living in a field.
Family friend Marja Byers suggested he ask the Lions Club for help. The Lions Club is known for helping people get glasses. His mother also encouraged him to seek help, but Miller said he didn’t want to take charity, so he got an eye patch and tried to make it work.
A month later, Miller lost his second lens. By that time, he was functionally blind and living in a friend’s trailer. And he was at his wits’ end.
A friend took him to Byers, executive director of Blindskills, a Salem-based nonprofit group that helps visually impaired people.
Byers and Miller looked for the lens in the trailer, to no avail. When Byers returned to work, she called Betty Levenhagen, the Salem Downtown Lions Club sight and hearing chairwoman.
The Lions Club paid for Miller’s $25 exam through the Lions Eyeglass Assistance Program. Last year, the club paid for 51 eye exams or glasses through the program, Levenhagen said.
Through her work with Northwest Human Services, Levenhagen said Miller might qualify for the nonprofit group’s program that buys glasses for homeless people.
Both programs send recipients to LensCrafters and Eye Focus Northwest, an independent optometrist office inside the store.
A day after calling Levenhagen, Byers took Miller for an eye exam. Byers said she was impressed with optometrist Mark Fast.
“No one has ever corrected (his eyesight) that well,” she said.
Fast told Miller that he does have low vision, but he saw no evidence that Miller would become legally blind.
Fast said he doesn’t know if other doctors made a mistake or if new technology has made a difference.
When it comes to vision, there are norms people are expected to hit as they age. It’s possible that since Miller’s vision was so far off of what most children experience, someone might have predicted he would become so nearsighted that he would be legally blind.
Fast corrected Miller’s vision so well that with half inch-thick lenses, his vision is now 20/30. With 20/30 vision, Miller can see well enough to qualify for a driver’s license, something he was told he would never be able to do.
“He’s so elated having better vision than he ever thought was possible,” Byers said. “Every time I see him now, he’s smiling.”
It has taken a while for Miller to get used to having better vision. He said he sees colors in neon signs differently. Walking makes him nauseated as a roller coaster might, he added.
Miller said he can comprehend what’s going on in a situation in seconds now when it took minutes before. Having so much more visual stimuli flooding his senses can be overwhelming and emotional, he said. But on the whole, it’s less stressful, he said.
“It’s the best feeling in the world to know what’s going on around you,” he said.
Miller said he has big plans, dreams of going scuba diving and flying a plane.
Now that he can see, he’s getting odd jobs, such as yard work, so he can feed himself, Byers said. Miller said he plans on enrolling at Chemeketa Community College for the winter term and studying to become a forest ranger.
Miller said he was always smart, but his eyesight made it difficult to read. He dropped out of school at 16 and got his GED because he was mercilessly teased for holding books close to his face. Now he hopes to earn a bachelor’s or master’s degree, he said.
“I just want to become something now, because I know I can,” he said. “Now I will apply myself to the fullest extent of the capabilities I’ve been known to have.”
