At 24, UR grad seeing clearly for first time

Imagine seeing the world clearly for the first time at the age of 24.

Imagine that everything you know by sight is blurry and distorted, until one day you put on a peculiar-looking pair of glasses and suddenly things are in focus.

Welcome to the life of Michael Davis.

Four months pregnant with her only child, Regina Davis was hit by another driver in Long Island, N.Y., in 1984. Her car was totaled, but her injuries appeared to be minor.

Michael Davis was born five months later, right on time. His vision was fine at first, but within months he developed severe cataracts and later glaucoma.

The problems stemmed from loss of amniotic fluid in the womb after his mother's accident. To release the pressure on his eyes and keep from losing all vision, Davis underwent 23 surgeries as a child.

"It has always been really blurry -- there were colors and people and faces, but I couldn't really see much of anything," Davis said in his gentle way.

"Some people say, 'I'm blind as a bat without my glasses.' Well, I really am," he adds with an infectious laugh.

Davis, a Chesapeake resident and a 2007 graduate of the University of Richmond, went to see a new optometrist in March 2008.

"I just went because my mom suggested that we go," said Davis, who was raised by his mother and grandmother.

After a couple of hours of testing, Dr. Kenneth Lebow asked Davis to try on a pair of bioptic glasses, designed to help low-vision patients through a small telescopic lens attached to prescription glasses.

The first thing he saw was the eye chart.

"I had never been able to read past the third letter E," he said. "When I could read E, H, B on the third line, I was like, 'This has never happened before -- keep going.' I was just so amazed, I started crying."

Davis, who has 20/200 vision on a good day, was seeing at a 20/40 level.

The next thing he saw was his grandmother's face, in detail, for the first time.

"If I used all the words in Webster's dictionary, it really wouldn't be enough to describe just how amazing that was," he said.

. . .

Imagine being granted the ability to see but having it out of reach financially.

When Davis was informed that the BITA Vision glasses he needed would cost $1,800, he left empty-handed.

In April 2008, he met Martha Macias, a counselor with the state's Department for the Blind and Vision Impaired.

"I was very surprised that Mike did not know about us," she said. "I gave him my business card, and we did an intake [interview] a few weeks later."

Shortly after that meeting, the department was able to cover the cost of the glasses to help Michael with his job as a support technician with the city of Norfolk.

Last May, Davis brought home the BITA Vision glasses.

"I'm the one that took him to pick them up, because I'm his chauffeur," said his grandmother, Sara Royster. "We're on the interstate and he started reading those green signs -- well, I almost had a wreck. I started crying and said, 'Lord, I can't cry right now, I've got to see.'"

"When he first got these glasses, I think we all cried at the drop of the hat for two weeks straight," his mother added. "We'd break down just thinking about the blessing of my son being able to see all these things we didn't even know he couldn't see for the first time."

Lebow also sent Davis home with a new pair of everyday prescription glasses that helped his peripheral vision, plus a handheld electronic device to make reading books easier.

He speculated that Davis, like many low-vision patients he sees, just hadn't been exposed to a specialist who knew his specific needs.

"It's not as unusual as you might think," Lebow said. "Unfortunately, when people have their eyes examined, some tend to look at things as being routine. If they can't prescribe a pair of routine glasses, that's that.

"This is really specialty work, visual rehabilitation if you will. It takes someone who is willing to invest the time both in terms of working with the technology and the patient."

Davis added: "You don't know you can't see until you see. It's more beautiful than I ever could have imagined. Even after months, I didn't want to take them off. I felt like someone was going to take them away from me."

. . .

Davis was in Richmond last week to see some friends graduate from UR. It was the first graduation he had seen, his own included.

He used the chance to visit some of the faculty and staff with whom he formed relationships over the years.

During his four years, Davis navigated the campus from memorization, never using a walking stick. He read from books with enlarged text but beyond that did everything just as a normal student would.

He went on to become one of the only blind students to graduate from the university, leaving with a bachelor's degree in business administration.

Joe B. Hoyle, an associate accounting professor at the school, became a friend.

"He loved coming by my office and talking about music and accounting, and I loved that, too," Hoyle said. "He was a very good student and just a fun guy to have in class.

"We never made much of a point that he had a problem or disability. He was there to get an education and work hard, not to tell us about the disability."

"I was just always amazed that he was able to keep up," added Steve Bisese, vice president for student development. "He was a part of campus life, involved in student groups, and when he graduated a tear came down my face -- he's just such a remarkable person."

. . .

A couple of months after he received his glasses, Davis channeled his emotions through a modern platform: YouTube.

With best friend Joe Leece, a fellow UR graduate, he created a video to show the effect the glasses had made on his life.

Set to music, the clip shows images from everyday life -- stars in the sky, street signs, freshly cut grass -- as Davis saw them before, using software to distort them, and what he sees now.

The project was born of both joy and frustration in having missed out on years of seeing clearly.

"It's not that I'm frustrated for me; it's just that I'm frustrated because I wish more people knew about it," he said. "I want to help more people."

Released on the Internet a little over a month ago, Davis said he already has seen a positive response.

He hopes to earn a master's degree in accounting and eventually build a nonprofit organization to inform the visually impaired about what services are available to them and keep them up to date with technology.

"I really think more people should know about it so they won't have to go through what I went through," he said.

In the meantime, Davis, who lost his job with the city of Norfolk when grant funding was cut last year, is looking for a part-time job while taking courses at Old Dominion University. He also is taking up some new activities.

Next month, he will run his second race -- 5 miles to benefit the Norfolk children's hospital where he spent so much time as a child -- with the help of a guide runner. Last month, he finished 73rd in a field of 300 in a 5K.

He's also learning to play golf, keeping up on classical piano, and spending time with his girlfriend of five years. And he's starting to think more seriously about a lifelong goal: driving.

"There are possibilities that that could occur," Lebow said. "There's a lot of work involved, of course, but there are people who do in fact drive with low vision using BITA telescopes."

Davis' grandmother is certain he will accomplish that and more.

"I never doubt that boy anymore," she said. "Everything that he says he's going to do, he does. If you can't help him, just get out of the way, because it's as good as done."

Contact Wesley P. Hester at (804) 649-6976 or whester@timesdispatch.com.

Norfolk-based Conforma Contact Lenses makes the BITA (Bi-Level Telescopic Apparatus) Low Vision Device, which allows Michael Davis to see at a 20/40 level for the first time in his life.

Davis has 20/200 vision -- he can see at 20 feet what a person with normal vision can see from 200 feet. So with the new glasses, he can see for the first time the chalkboard in class, street signs and stars.

To help low-vision patients such as Davis whose vision cannot be corrected, by normal means, beyond the legally blind limit, BITA mounts a miniature telescope on the lens of a fitted pair of glasses.

The idea was invented by a Virginia Beach resident with low vision, Brandon Edwards, who has been perfecting the device since the 1970s.

"Necessity is the mother of invention. They were a tremendous help to me," said Edwards, who began marketing the glasses in the 1980s. "Now we work through a network of doctors to see if it works for their patient. It's not for everybody."

The miniature scope on regular glasses creates a bilevel effect called simulvision. Looking at a distant object, Davis can see a magnified view of it clearly just above a nonmagnified view of the world. The two are so close in his field of vision that he can balance them simultaneously.

The BITA glasses cost about $2,000. In Virginia, they are covered in some cases by the Virginia Department for the Blind and Vision Impaired.

For more information, contact the state at (804) 371-3140, or visit the Conforma Web site at www.conforma.com. -- Wesley P. Hester