EAU CLAIRE,
Wis. - Father Edmund Klimek, the silver-haired chaplain at Sacred
Heart Hospital, sat in his office one morning in May staring through
thick spectacles at the list of patients he planned to visit.
At 8 a.m., his little corner of the hospital was peaceful.
Then, a fist
pounded the door.
"Father
Klimek! Father Klimek!" shouted Renay Poirier at the door.
Poirier, a
40-year-old physical therapy assistant, had a wife and two children,
whose faces he had not seen in almost a decade since the day he
was blinded in an electrical explosion. Now, Poirier stood in
the Klimek's doorway, wild with excitement.
"I can
see!" he shouted. "I can see!"
Poirier had
a strong faith, the stronger for having been tested. Born in Bloomer,
a small city of 3,000 about 25 miles north of Eau Claire, Poirier
was 5 years old when his parents divorced. His mother, a nurse,
was left to raise five children by herself.
Poirier grew
into an athletic young man. In his senior year of high school,
he quarterbacked the Bloomer football team to Heart of the North
champion ship. He ran track and pole vaulted.
He and Connie
Baier were childhood sweethearts. At 23, they were engaged. At
24, they were married. In a few years, they had a daughter, Alea,
and two years later, a second girl, Kara.
Soon after
Kara's birth, on the morning of Oct. 9, 1990, Poirier left the
family's three-bedroom ranch in Eau Claire for his job at Cray
Re search in nearby Chippewa Falls.
Poirier was
6-foot-1 and had retained his athletic build since high school.
At Cray, he was a senior maintenance technician, working with
electrical, air conditioning and lighting systems. He fixed problems,
and on this day, they had a big one. The entire building complex
had lost power.
While Poirier
was working outside one of the buildings, two groups of electrical
wires housed in a metal cabinet touched, triggering a high-voltage
explosion. Poirier was thrown backward. Later, he would not be
able to remember where his body had landed, or whether he had
lost consciousness. His first clear memory after the accident:
pain. Pain in his neck, shoulders and back. Pain in his eyes.
When Poirier's
ophthalmologist, James Redmann, examined him, he found a few small
lesions on the cornea of each eye. Lesions of this kind will usually
heal with treatment; when they healed, Redmann believed, Poirier's
vision would improve. Within three weeks, the lesions had healed.
But Poirier's
vision did not improve. It got worse and he was in deep pain.
Try as he might, Redmann could not explain it. He tested the flow
of blood to Poirier's eye and did an MRI to search for defects
in the brain or back of the eyes. He found nothing with either
test.
And yet something
terrible had happened to Poirier's vision, which had been 20/20
before the accident. In Wisconsin, a person with 20/200 vision
is considered legally blind. Poirier's vision was now worse than
20/400.
Poirier could
see a hand a few feet in front of his face. That was all.
He stayed
home from work for weeks, then months. He couldn't drive. He couldn't
read. His wife and daughters were blurs, differing only in size.
He was afraid of stepping on one of the girls and hurting her.
Once he overheard
one of his wife's friends try to comfort her: "It must be
just terrible for you. It's like taking care of another kid."
The words stung.
He loved to
cook, but he couldn't see when things boiled, and by the time
he heard them, it was too late. The family bought a new stove
with a glass top, and Poirier put marks down with glue to indicate
low, medium, high. They bought a bike built for two and his wife
rode in front so that she could steer.
In June 1991,
eight months after the accident, Poirier went back to work, but
being the assistant to the man replacing light bulbs did not make
him feel better about himself.
His faith
in God was not shaken, but his faith in himself was. It had been
a long time since he felt useful. Then one afternoon, a month
and a half after he had returned to work, Poirier was riding home
in a cab. On the street, a man waved his arms for the cab to pull
over. A 78-year-old woman had suffered a heart attack.
Poirier explained
that he knew cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but could not see.
Some one would have to guide him to the woman. The man grabbed
his arm. Poirier performed CPR for about 10 minutes and was able
to keep the woman alive until paramedics arrived.
Even though
the woman died a few days later, her relatives had called him
a hero, and her saw himself in a different light.
More than
a month later, he lost his job.
Determined
to return, he learned to use a special computer, sticking Braille
tabs on the home row of the keyboard. It took a year to learn
typing, but when Poirier did, Cray hired him back. This time he
typed work orders, tracked productivity and served as the engineering/maintenance
safety representative. Although he enjoyed the work, it didn't
last. After a year (late 1993), he lost this job again, and his
mood darkened.
He struggled
to remember his wife's face and to imagine the changes in the
girls' looks. Even his own face was becoming a distant memory.
His hands could feel the thinning hair on his head.
Not long after
he lost his job at Cray for the second time, Poirier stood at
the edge of the Chippewa River. He thought about jumping in. Then
he thought about the woman whose life he had tried to save, and
about his wife and children. He had more living to do.
In 1994, he
entered the College of St. Catherine in the Twin Cities to become
a physical therapist assistant. Far from being easy, it required
knowing how muscles fit together, even though he could not see
their shapes. He would have to keep up by audiotape to learn what
the other students were reading.
In the beginning,
Poirier received tutoring from other students. Later he became
a tutor himself. The two-year program took Poirier 2-1/2 years
to complete, and in May 1997 he graduated. That September he was
hired by Sacred Heart Hospital, where his reputation with patients
and staff alike was outstanding.
On May 23
of this year, Poirier stood by the ninth-floor window of the hospital,
wiping one of his instruments, when pain erupted in his head,
a headache so severe he grabbed at his temple. In the next instant,
he felt numb. Light flooded his eyes. Then, a sensation of floating
on air. Then he realized he was actually seeing things down on
the ground.
He ran to
the hospital chapel to pray and to thank God.
He wanted
someone to be there with him. And that was how he came to be standing
in Klimek's doorway. The chaplain went with him, and they prayed
and read the Bible together.
Redmann gave
Poirier an eye test. His vision was now 20/40, "a dramatic
improvement," in the doctor's view. At that level, Poirier
might have trouble reading the fine print on an eye-drop bottle,
but he could probably read a newspaper.
In explaining
what had happened to Poirier, science would come up short, Redmann
said.
Poirier called
the return of his vision "a gift from God."
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