How a Warby Parker Optometrist Saved My Eyesight (Or, Some Thoughts About Miracles)

It was just a routine eye examination. At least, that’s how it started out.

A few weeks ago, I walked from my Chelsea apartment down to the Warby Parker location in the Meatpacking District for my annual check-up and eyeglass prescription. A friend of mine jokes that Warby Parker is the “Jiffy Lube of eye exams,” but I’ve always felt that the optometrists there are knowledgeable and thorough. This visit with Dr. Timothy Oh would confirm my assumption.

After reading several lines of letters through a clicking rotary of lenses, Dr. Oh asked me whether I’d like to be dilated so that he could examine the backsides of my eyes. I responded the way that most of you probably do: “I’d rather not ruin my entire day squinting to read street signs while wearing a ridiculous pair of disposable sun shades.” But Dr. Oh persisted, explaining the importance of a full examination to my overall eye health. I was finally persuaded.

A few eyedrops, a fifteen-minute wait, a quick examination before I would be on my merry way.

Except, Dr. Oh saw something concerning. A dark spot on the back of one of my eyes. He said it was “probably a Nevus,” which is like a freckle that can, in rare cases, develop into melanoma. Gulp.

A few weeks later, I was sitting in the waiting room of a retina specialist across town with a rabble of butterflies in my belly. After some initial tests, they photographed my eyes on a couple of machines. “We’ll send these images to the doctor,” the technician said, “who you’ll see next to review them.”

Only I did not see the doctor next. I was called back by another technician who informed me that I needed to go down the hall to have additional photos with a more powerful camera. When this didn’t yield results, they transferred me to another room next door for yet another round of imaging on another contraption. The technician seemed almost confused. He asked me to see the original referral and was continually stepping in and out of the room to consult with others in hushed tones.

After two hours of testing, I’m finally ushered into the doctor’s examination room in a full-blown panic. The ophthalmologist enters, sits down at his desk, pulls up dozens of images of my eyes on the large monitor and surveys them in the kind of silence that feels like concern.

“Can you recount the exact conversation you had with your optometrist that led you here?” he asked.  

Swallowing hard, I take him back through the story about how Dr. Oh convinced me to do dilation, noticed a dark spot on one eye, and referred me to his practice. He stands up, turns off the overhead lights, reclines the chair, and places something that looks like night vision goggles around his head to survey my eyes for himself. The examination lasts maybe two minutes, but feels like infinity.

The lights are turned back on, I’m lifted back into an upright position and the doctor falls back into his desk chair. He is wide-eyed with the kind of sober look on his face that tells me I am about to hear some life-altering news.

“You are a very, very lucky man,” he said slowly.

On my left eye, there was indeed a small Nevus just as my optometrist said, “totally benign and nothing to worry about.” But on my right eye, they identified a small retinal tear. Fluid had been leaking through the tear and had formed a pocket that was “about to burst” any day now. If this pocket had ruptured, the doctor said, my retina would have detached from my eye, and I would have lost vision in that eye. Due to the location, the blindness might have been permanent.

Struggling to keep my composure, I asked him what this all means.

“It means your optometrist saved your eyesight,” he said. “Because if you had not come to our office today, you would have lost your vision, perhaps permanently. But since you’re here, we can repair this tear with a simple procedure and you’ll be fine.”

The accumulated emotions finally release, and I ugly cried into my cupped hands. The doctor handed me a Kleenex box as he leads me into the adjoining room where he used a laser to repair the damage to my retina. Moments later, he was done and I was instructed to lay back with my eyes closed for 10 minutes until the nurse returned to walk me out. The doctor said goodbye and left to continue his rounds. When he was halfway down the hall, I faintly heard him say to someone, “My God, that guy is a very lucky man.”

You don’t have to be a particularly spiritual person to recognize that they only rational response to an experience like this is gratitude. After returning home from the retina specialist, I plopped down on my couch and fell into what James Finley calls “a liturgy of the body.” I bowed my head, and folded my hands, and rambled my gratitude: Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I also realized I needed to return to Warby Parker and properly thank Dr. Oh for treating me with such care and seriousness. In the face of my resistance to dilation, many optometrists would have simply bid me adieu. But Dr. Oh chose to press me, advocating for my wellbeing.  And since the highest expression of gratitude is cupcakes, I took him a dozen of the best flavors from Billy’s Bakery. (You can watch the video here.)

In the days since this experience, I’ve also been thinking a lot about language. Some might speak of this experience in terms of “coincidence,” understanding the these improbably favorable events in terms of randomness. My ophthalmologist used the language of “luck,” which is like coincidence, but emphasizes that the chance event happened to fall in my favor. Others might use the language of “privilege,” highlighting the undeniable truth that the outcome would have been different if I had not access to quality medical care from well-trained clinicians paid for by medical insurance.

I’m tempted to use the word “miracle.”

In order believe in miracles, you don’t have to walk through a parted sea or witness a corpse springing back to life. You only have to live awake and aware in the present moment. That’s what I’ve come to believe, at least.

When I was younger, I thought about miracles only as events that defy the laws of nature. But that’s a rather limited definition, and if you accept such a definition, you may not experience miracles that often, if at all. But these days, I think of miracles more as “invitations to behold divine presence within the ordinary fabric of life.”

Yes, I know how fraught this word can be. By definition, miracles are mysterious, which means they exist beyond the rational mind. You can ask all sorts of questions about miracles for which there’s no clear answer. How do they work? How are they confirmed? Why do miracles seem to show up for in one moment and not another? These are questions I cannot answer, which is why miracles are a matter of faith. We trust in them despite our inability to fully explain them.

I used to imagine God—a bearded man above the cloud—looking down on earth and deciding whether to push the miracle button. I now see the many problems with this understanding. If miracles are the result of God consciously choosing to relieve suffering or bestow favor, then what does that say about people who never escape their suffering or ask for favor and come up empty handed? But, if God is what we call the spirit of goodness and Love that infuses our world, then maybe a “miracle” is just what we call the pinholes through which that spirit leaks through into our ordinary lives. Perhaps that’s the name for any experience that results in Love bubbling up or joy manifesting or peace flooding in or gratitude circulating through your system.

The late writer Frederich Buechner taught that to believe in God is to believe in the possibility of miracles. He wrote, “A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.” Miracles are experiences that both boggle the mind and touch the soul. They don’t have to be spectacular. They don’t need to defy gravity or time or space. They come in packages large and small. And most importantly, they are all around us, often hiding in plain sight (pardon the pun) just waiting to be acknowledged. As I heard someone say years ago, “Sometimes miracles are just kind people with good hearts.”

I’m sure that much of my experience last week was coincidental. And I know that a lot of my good fortune resulted from privilege. But I can’t help seeing the miracle within it all, too. Goodness was glimpsed, grace was felt, gratitude was awakened.

It was just a routine eye examination. At least, that’s how it started out.