Sunday Rerun: Next in sight

It must have been raining or something, because I stopped by a psych class one morning to hear the story I've never forgotten. We heard that a woman who had been in a catatonic state at Baltimore's Sheppard Pratt Hospital was taken for a car ride one day, and on the way back the car in which she was a passenger suddenly veered off the road on one of those bad curves on Charles Street.  The woman either fell out of the car or hit her head inside the car in some way; however it happened, the bump on her noggin took her out of catatonia and back among the sentient!


The guy sitting next to me in class fell out of his chair just then, but he didn't have the same luck as the lady in the car.


I bring this up because I saw something similar happened to Mary Ann Franco, a 70-year-old lady in Florida.  She injured her spine in a car wreck in 1993 and gradually went blind thereafter.


Then, last August, she took a spill in her home.

Ms Taylor

“I was in my living room, going over to the door. My foot caught on a tile, and it flipped me. I hit my head in the back, and hit it on something else, maybe the fireplace,” she said.


As if being blind wasn't enough to deal with, the fall incapacitated her, and she had to wear a neck brace until a four-hour operation earlier this year.


You know how you feel all groggy and mixed up when you come out of a deep sleep, right?  Well, Ms Mary Ann woke up confused...


And she looked at the foot of her bed at a woman standing there, and she said, "Hey, lady in purple, get me something for pain!"


The lady in purple was her niece.  And it was then that she realized she could see again, after all these years!


Her neurosurgeon, Dr John Afshar, said this was totally unexpected: "The restoration of Mary Ann Franco's vision is a true miracle. I really don't have a scientific explanation for it."


He added that one theory could be that the accident could have affected an artery, restricting blood flow to the part of the brain which controls vision.


There's another theory.  But you have to believe in angels and miracles!