Ukrainian gains vision, thanks to PV women

As her fingers rubbed across the picture of her 13-year-old son, Anatole, tears rolled down the cheeks of the 37-year-old mother from Dolyna, Ukraine. For the first time in her life she saw the color of his eyes and the individual strands of his hair.

“I knew I loved him,” Tetyana Seniv said through her Prairie Village interpreter and host Vera Glywa. “He is my son. But I had never seen him clearly; never saw the color of his eyes, the detail of his eyebrows.”

Tetyana was born with cataracts, and until last week, her visual world was limited to a few inches in front of her face, looking through a magnifying glass. Through a series of events initiated by Prairie Village residents Nancy Wallerstein and Cindy Dwigans, Tetyana underwent two successful surgeries in three days last week to remove the cataracts. She now will undergo two follow-up Lasik surgeries in the next week to fine tune her vision to an expected 20/20.

Tetyana said she feels reborn.

“The colors are so vibrant,” she said, “especially the flowers. They were so pretty. I have such good vision now. I knew it would be better but I never thought it would be this good. I can see my hands, the wrinkles, the veins, and I can see how my face has changed.

“If it wasn’t for Cindy and Nancy, I would have died not knowing there was so much beauty in the world.”

Tetyana’s odyssey began last August when Prairie Village Mayor Ron Shaffer asked Wallerstein to be part of a city delegation going to Dolyna to finalize a Sister City agreement between the two communities. While there, Wallerstein, who is a member of the Johnson County Museum Advisory Board and the Shawnee Indian Mission Foundation, met Tetyana, who serves as director of a historical museum.

“In this country she would be legally blind,” Wallerstein said. “I kept thinking and wondering how she could run a museum.”

When Wallerstein returned to Prairie Village, she contacted Dr. Jim Denning at Discover Vision in Leawood, who agreed to examine Tetyana to see if her cataracts could be removed.

The next step was to get Tetyana to Prairie Village. Wallerstein enlisted the help of friend Terry Frederick, former Prairie Village City Councilman and a member of the Prairie Village Lions Club. Lions Clubs throughout the metropolitan area and even in Alaska, the Prairie Village Sister City Committee, and individuals donated the $1,400 needed to bring Tetyana to America.

Tetyana arrived in Prairie Village on Jan. 18, saw Denning and surgeon John Doane on Jan. 21 and had her first cataract surgery on Jan. 25 and the second one on Jan. 27. Doane said Tetyana’s condition surprised him.

“If I had to rank her condition by U.S. standards, she was in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent,” he said.

Denning said babies born with cataracts are rare and that Tetyana’s cataracts were more serious than they expected. He said they were as dark as a piece of coal.

“Usually you can put a device in there and liquefy it and suck it out like jelly; this one was as hard as a marble so it was a hard surgery,” Denning said.

Tetyana’s first surgery was the morning of Jan. 25. At about 10 that night at the home of Vera and Robert Glywa, her host family in Prairie Village, the patch over her eye was removed and Tetyana slowly, almost hesitantly, lifted her eyelid to a squint and then quickly shut it.

“She said, ‘What a scary scene,’” said Vera, who is a member of the Prairie Village Sister City Committee and speaks Ukrainian. “I asked her what she meant and if she could see anything. She told me she saw lines, thin lines.”

Tetyana opened her eyes a little further and the lines, the first things she had clearly seen in 37 years, were Vera’s hair. She told Vera and Robert that she had never seen lines as thin as hair.

“Then she started looking around and looked at her comforter and said she could see the threads,” Vera said. “She looked at the flowers and was amazed at how bright the colors were. A whole new world opened up for her. There were no dry eyes.

“She stayed up all night looking at the wallpaper, everything in her room. I don’t think she slept all night.”

Tetyana said she looked at everything in her wallet that night.

During her follow-up visit last Thursday after her second surgery, she said she was grateful to everyone who contributed to her journey.

“They all are such good people,” she said. “I’m so grateful to Dr. Doane; he has miracle hands.”

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