Meet Breyanna | Episode #1

Episode 1

Meet Breyanna

Breyanna is 27 and was born sighted but was diagnosed with FEVR at age 9. She navigated high school with limited vision and had her drivers license. By the time she was 21 she lost most of her vision and ultimately her license. Listen to this episode to hear more about her story and what she’s got planned for her future.

Show notes:

Breyanna references a vitrectomy surgery

  • DR. PATRICK DROSTE: We would like to welcome the world to our Through Our Eyes podcast, brought to you by the Pediatric Retinal Research Foundation. We are a community of visually impaired young adults, talking about what it's like to navigate through high school, through college, through career development, and beyond. We tap into our experiences and cover a wide range of topics, providing you with actionable tips and strategies that may be able to help you negotiate these same obstacles. My name is Dr. Patrick Droste. I am a pediatric ophthalmologist practicing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I've been taking care of visually impaired children, young adults, and now older adults, and it's been a real experience watching them negotiate the different challenges in life. I frequently refer to this as the fish ladder of visual challenges starting out at a low level, and each time jumping up the ladder a little bit, swimming around a little bit, learning some new skills to get up to the next. And we have three outstanding, outstanding, young adults, that have done this, all three come from different backgrounds of visual disability and have different stories, and we've asked them all to talk to us about three things. One, a little bit about themselves in her background. Two, what were the greatest challenges they had in their formative years? Three, what do they consider their greatest accomplishments during his time, and lastly, how are they preparing for the future?

    We are now going to hear from Breyanna, who has a little different background, but still fights with the same challenges of blindness and succeeding in the sighted world.

    BREYANNA: Hi, everyone, my name is Breyanna Willitt. I am 27 years old, and I am currently a student at Alfred State University in New York. I was born with a genetic eye condition called FEVR, but we didn't know that I had it until I was around the age of nine. My sister and I were running around the table as children do, playing tag when my sister decided to switch directions and we collided heads. My mom immediately thought that I had broken my cheekbone because I had formed a really large cyst under my eye, so she took me to my local pediatrician. By the time we got there, my cheek had swollen up really largely. My pediatrician confirmed that I did not have a broken cheekbone, but there was something odd going on in my eyes. We then went to a local ophthalmologist who took one look at my eye, took some pictures, and referred me up to Dr. Mina Chung at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, New York.

    From there, she was able to diagnose me as having FEVR. After discovering that I had FEVR and after going through a couple of different surgeries with Dr. Chung, I was referred out to Michigan to go see Dr. Trese, who at that point had been the biggest person that Dr. Chung had found out to be a specialist in FEVR and treating FEVR. So I bounce between Dr. Trese, and Dr. Capone, and back at Strong Memorial Hospital with Dr. Diloreto. By that point in my life, I was basically completely blind in my left eye with very limited vision in my right eye, reading at about 2080. Obviously, as a kid, I didn't know what was going on, and I never thought anything differently about the way I could see so it really took us, me and my family, by surprise. So immediately after my 10th birthday, I was rushed into emergency surgery for an emergency vitrectomy, where I had a gas bubble put in my eye and laser surgery in my right to try to save the remaining vision that I had.

    So growing up, switching from living my life as a normal sighted 10-year-old to now being a visually impaired 10-year-old was quite interesting. I never had any special accommodations up until that point, throughout my schooling.

    By the time I reached high school though, my vision in my right eye seemed to be dwindling. At that point, I had met with a director to establish certain modifications to the way that I was being taught, and I had things such as enlarged texts, a scribe, and people reading me information. By the time I graduated high school, I was able to drive, I just made the mark at 2060, and I graduated high school with pretty good grades, and nothing seemed to really be different in my life.

    By the time I turned 21, my vision had gotten so bad that I wasn't able to pass the eye exam and they took my license away, probably for the best. So at that point, having my license taken away and I had a feeling of a sense of, I guess, loneliness and a pity party, I suppose. I didn't really know what I was going to do with my life. At that point, I was living in an apartment and just trying to work my way through figuring out what I wanted to do.

    A couple of years ago, I decided that I was going to take initiative and began my journey throughout college. I'm currently studying Human Services Management and hoping to graduate in the spring of this year. My family is incredible and honestly, I don't know where I would be without them. I've definitely had struggles in my life just dealing with vision loss and how my life has been changed, but I'm working through it. I still struggle to this day, but there's always good things to look forward to in the future.

    DR. PATRICK DROSTE: The podcast is called Through Our Eyes. Make sure to like and follow our Discord channel, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, and let us know if you have any questions or have a topic you would like us to cover. We have some interesting topics coming up in the very near future, and they're basically broken down into technology, gaining independence, college, and career development. We're going to be talking about learning technical skills, and discussing different high and low technical devices like Versa, Perkins Brailler, Braille Compass Trekker, etc. And then we're going to work on gaining independence, on home repair, taking care of things in the house, mobility, cooking, and the challenges of daily life. For the young people who are trying to pursue careers in college, as we heard from Breyanna, some of the challenges there, navigating inaccessible textbooks, and software, getting help from disability resources, and so forth. Then we want to work on choosing a job that's right for you and your skills, using community services, and choosing how to get involved in the community. We have tremendous things planned, and we hope you tune in again for our next podcast. This is Dr. Droste saying goodnight to all of you and on behalf of our staff at the PRRF, thank you.