Library Collections: Document: Full Text

(Based on a recent case.)

I Want to Thank You with My Eyes.

I'm a May-Day baby (1919), so you see I can't talk yet, but I want the "thank you" which I feel to reach you through the brightness of my eyes which you saved from blindness. It happened this way: Father and Mother have always been pretty poor, and I guess they didn't go to school very much or learn anything about how to keep well and strong. Then, although I don't like to believe it, I am pretty sure they didn't care very much about having me come into the world. They lived in a poor section of New York before my arrival, and every once in a while a kind nurse came to visit mother, urging her to go to a maternity center so that she might learn how to take care of herself and me. Mother did go once or twice, but she didn't realize the importance of what she heard there, and soon made up her mind that she knew all right what to do -- so stopped going. She didn't follow any of the directions which had been given to her there, and the result was that I surprised her by arriving much sooner than I was expected. It was only by the luckiest of chances that at the last minute, as I was about ready to cry "Hello," someone sent an emergency call to a hospital, and soon after an ambulance came clanging down the street and stopped at our house -- and then the nice young ambulance doctor helped me with my debut in New York. But after he drove away there wasn't any more medical care either for me or for mother.

I felt all right, except that my eyes were red and hot, and in a few days they burned so and were so swollen that I couldn't open the lids or see any of the nice interesting things which I knew must be going on around me. Naturally, I couldn't tell anyone what the matter was you would have supposed they would see for themselves. But mother wasn't feeling well at all, and wasn't paying much attention to me, and the neighbor women who came in said all babies had sore eyes, and that I would be all right in a short time.

But all the same I wasn't getting better, and I knew it, and cried my loudest to attract attention. Again luck was with me, for who should come in but the nurse from the Center. She took one look at my eyes, and seemed pretty scared. I heard her bustling round, and then she went away, only to return a few minutes later to tell mother that she had gone out to telephone to THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR THE PREVENTION OF BLINDNESS about my eyes. That scared me still more, for I thought, "This must be pretty serious." Then mother began to be frightened, too. I knew that now something would be done. I didn't learn until later what a narrow escape I had.

Mrs. Hathaway, of this National Committee, received the message and then began telephoning all around to get an expert to come up and save my eyes. Everything seemed to go wrong. It was late in the day and the doctors' offices were closed. She wasn't able until late in the evening to locate the State Nurse who helps out so often in cases like mine. And then, to make matters worse, our family moved that night. Everything was packed up in a hurry and it wasn't until eleven o clock that I got settled down again in another little flat over further East toward the river.

My eyes burned and ached so all that night that I was sure I was going blind, but early in the morning in came another nurse, this time the one whom Mrs. Hathaway had finally located. She had spent a long time trying to find me, going first to the wrong address because mother, in her worry, had made a mistake in giving it, but following one clue after another until she located me at last.

She learned that absolutely nothing had been done for my eyes, and I can tell you she made things fly. It was but a jiffy before she packed me off to the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital, and there a splendid doctor and beautiful nurses in white dresses put medicine in my eyes, every little while at first, until finally they said that I would surely see. One nurse said that I would have been blind in a few hours if I had not been brought to the Hospital. What an escape! Oh, how glad I was! All the time I couldn't help thinking how many babies might go blind unless the Committee for the Prevention of Blindness could always be on the lookout for little folks like me. When I grow up enough to talk I am going to thank you with words, but for a while yet I guess I'll just have to say "thank you" with my eyes.

BABY M --