Second Sight: A Video Essay by David Snider

Second Sight
A Reporter's Notebook from a Nightline Video Essay
by David Snider

My father, Harold Snider, first told me about his new friend Ellen Bomer. He said that she was blinded in the 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. She had sustained many injuries, especially to her eyes.

Before my father arranged for us to meet, he told me that "she was a very strong person but she has a difficult adjustment ahead of her". He meant that she would have to accept her blindness, and that she would have to begin a rehabilitation process to become complete again. I was very familiar with blindness. Both of my parents were born blind, and I also knew hundreds of people in the blind community. I'd been shooting photo essays and documentaries about blind people since 1990, but I'd never met someone who survived a terrorist bombing.

When I first sat down and talked with Ellen and her husband Don, I could sense -her strength and dignity. It showed in her firm voice, in the way she held her head and talked straight at me. She may have been injured but she was hardly broken. She knew what was ahead of her but she couldn't imagine how tough it would really be. Months of rehabilitation and training in reading Braille, cane travel and independent living skills were ahead of her. Several thousand newly-blinded people go through rehab every year in the US. It is the crucial turning point from being helpless to becoming empowered with independence. She said she didn't want pity from anyone. "I can do it"she said, and I believed her. Don Bomer told me "We are so grateful for the help that your father has given us."

By the time he had spoken his last word, he had begun to cry. It was a little surprising to have this intense, strong Texan reveal his emotional frailty to me. I didn't know it then, but Don had actually been his wife's full-time caretaker for several months after the bombing. He'd been through every painful step with Ellen, and even after eight months, his grief wasn't going away. When they met my father and his wife Linda, they had finally found someone that would help them begin their recovery. He would get "leaky" whenever he talked about the bombing and Ellen's recovery, and his gratitude to my father also generated this emotional response.

Ellen was ready to tell her story to me, and to Nightline. She had already turned down several other major networks; she wasn't interested in being the fuel for the daily-news fire. She trusted that she wouldn't be portrayed as a victim, but as a normal person who is having an extraordinary experience.

In May, 1999, I went to Ruston, Louisiana, and visited Ellen at the Louisiana Center for the Blind. She was going through a daily series of classes in cooking, Braille, cane-travel and mobility training. Ellen's right hand had suffered some nerve damage, so reading Braille was even more difficult. To understand what the small raised dots were spelling, her sense of touch had to be sharp, not dull. It looked like her whole body and mind were being concentrated into her fingertip. Indeed, her sense of touch would have to replace her eyes as the primary information source. She would have to feel for the things she couldn't see. Ellen's ability to travel by herself would be one of her most difficult challenges. For my parents, their sense of direction and orientation were developed over their lifetime. For Ellen, it was like she was a baby who is learning how to crawl. In order to become physically independent, she would be entirely dependent on her long white cane, which is a standard tool for most blind people including my parents.

As Ellen and her mobility instructor walked around Ruston, he would direct her on a long route that would challenge her memory and sense of direction. When she encountered steps or other obstacles, she would have to use the tip of her cane to feel around it and negotiate her next footsteps. This wasn't easy at first and she was challenged by even the smallest obstacles. She had to learn how to listen for the traffic patterns to change before she could cross the street safely. Ellen's instructor wouldn't let her walk into the street, but he also wouldn't let her complaints or fears rise to the surface and keep her from learning the proper cane travel techniques.

When Ellen and Don came to Atlanta for the annual convention of The National Federation of the Blind, they got their first introduction to the greater blind community. There, they were able to try some of the tools that could assist Ellen's transition as a blind person. She bought a device that pronounced what color her clothes were; another device would act as a talking palm-pilot, memorizing names and phone numbers. The convention reinforced many of the ideas that my father had been telling Ellen and Don since their first day: that blindness is not the end of the world, just a change in lifestyle. When Ellen was asked to speak to the convention, she went in front of the 3,000 attendees and told the story of her journey since the bombing. It was very emotional and moving, and the audience response was enormous. People came up to her afterwards and congratulated her; she had arrived.

By April of 2000, Ellen and Don had settled into their home in Huntsville, Alabama. Ellen had graduated from the Louisiana Center for the Blind and was now considering her next direction in life. She had learned the adaptive skills to be a functional blind person, but she'd never given up hope of regaining some of her vision. Then one day her dentist told her of eye specialists at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, two hours away from her home. After some exams, Ellen was accepted as a patient for the "total eye reconstruction" which would include a cornea transplant. It would be performed by Dr. Doug Witherspoon and Dr. Bob Phillips. These two men were called "the A team" and were usually brought in as doctors of the last resort. They had performed more than 200 successful operations on victims of gunshot blasts and explosions, and although Ellen's vision was very poor, her right eye's optic nerve and retina were stable enough for them to attempt the complex procedures.

Before the surgery, Ellen waited with Don and her son Michael in a waiting room. Don sat next to her bed and held her hand. He had seen his wife recover so well from her injuries. This would be the 12th surgery on her eyes, and it might be the one that changes everything. They had been through so much together over the past twenty months. As Don's emotions swirled in his heart, he cried soft tears of hope and love for his wife.

During the eight hours of surgery, the doctors removed Ellen's clouded, injured cornea and cleaned up the inside of her eye. They even removed a small piece of glass that came from the bombing in Nairobi. The following day, the doctors removed the bandages and examined Ellen's eye. When they held up their fingers, she could see them. She could see colors and shapes but without the corrective lenses, she couldn't focus or see any details.

Ellen and Don went home and waited for her eye to heal. After one week, Ellen was given two pairs of glasses with powerful lenses. Finally, Ellen's eyes were able to see sharp, clear details. She could see her husband's smiling face, and she could even read the top half of the eye chart. The prayer she asked from God, to "give her just one eye," had been answered.

I returned to Huntsville and spent six days with Ellen, going through her days as she learned to see with her new lenses. She was able to watch television.

"Oooo, I can see his face," she said during a Paul Newman movie.

She could see the numbers on the remote control and on the telephone. Things that she could only feel were now visible, but not for very long periods. The physical demands of wearing the thick glasses also strained Ellen's eye, and she would have to take the glasses off or look away. Every day, Ellen's old friends would come by to see how she was doing, and she was delighted, as anyone would be, to see their faces again. At Easter dinner with her family, she was able to help her two-year-old grandson Andrew to cut his food into small pieces. She held his cheeks in her hand and kissed him, "You are so beautiful."

As a videojournalist, it was enormously satisfying to witness Ellen's delight in her new vision. Even though my parents have completely adapted to their blindness and are very complete as individuals, I still wish that they had some vision, just enough to see my photographs or even my face. When Ellen pulled me aside and looked at my face, it was the first time in my life that a blind person was able to see me and smile at me. After a year of friendship, she now had a face to put together with the voice.

Technical Note
While I was filming Ellen and her family, I was able to work very quietly and unobtrusively. When Ellen went shopping with her friend or her mother, she would accept a wireless microphone as a necessary part of the documentary process. Using a Canon XL1 for the entire shoot, I knew that my material would meet broadcast quality standards.

As a videojournalist, one of the best things about witnessing -these wonderful moments of Ellen's new vision was that I was recording every living moment with a silent camera, not just a slice of reality with a still camera that produces a noise every time the shutter clicks. The video camera was allowing me to be more unobtrusive, a better fly-on-the-wall than I could ever be with a still camera.

When I was finished filming and had returned to Washington with my DV tapes, I discovered that the entire ABC bureau had only one(!) digital video tape deck. The editor and my co-producer had never been part of a DV production, and so they mamanged to persuade me that the best thing to do would be to dub my tapes to analog format Betacam, to help make it easier for them to get the story done quicker. This resulted in a decrease in the quality of my video material. The pictures looked darker and less colorful than I know it should have been. I raised my concerns with the show's producers, but in their eyes, the decrease in quality was so subtle that they had to take my word for it.

When I walked through the edit bays in ABC's bureau, looking at all the racks upon racks of Beta decks, I felt like a time traveller taking one last look at the endangered species of analog equipment. When the digital tidal wave hits the networks, that's when the term "sink or swim" takes on a new meaning. I personally think that Nightline will have an ark bigger than Noah's, and they will survive.

David Snider is an independent photojournalist and videojournalist. He is Senior Producer of the multimedia website The Digital Journalist.