By Joe Vanden Acker
Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2003
What started as a simple walk to the hardware store ended with a cruel twist of fate for Amy Varda, '04.
On a brilliant Saturday of Labor Day Weekend last summer, the Lawrence University softball standout would be in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time and would lose her right eye because of it.
Life handed Varda a big basket of lemons, and she is making lemonade quite nicely, thank you. Against some sizeable odds, she returned to school in the fall and the softball field in the spring.
"It was just chance," she says of the accident. "I turned my head to the right just when a rock flew up and hit me in the eye."
Varda and her boyfriend, Nick Krupka, '04, were headed to the Kitz and Pfeil hardware store on South Lawe Street when the sound of a lawn mower made her turn. At first she wasn't sure what had happened. She had had Lasik surgery performed nine days earlier and believed that procedure might be making whatever had happened to her eye more painful.
"I don't think anyone else thought it was that serious," she says.
An ambulance was summoned, and Varda was soon in the emergency room at St. Elizabeth Hospital. Her eye was shut so tight that the ER doctor had to force the eyelid open.
"He basically saw a hole in my eye and a lot of blood," Varda says.
An ophthalmologist was called in, and she was transferred to Theda Clark Medical Center in Neenah. When the ophthalmologist discovered the rock still lodged in her eye, surgery was scheduled immediately. It would be the first of four surgeries over the next month.
Varda's parents, Joe and JoAnn, arrived from Mackinaw, Ill., late Saturday, and softball coach Kim Tatro also was summoned. Following another surgery the next day to deal with bacteria in the eye, the doctors told Varda's parents and her teammates that playing softball was out of the question.
"That's when it kind of settled in, the reality of her losing her eye," says teammate and former roommate Sarah Sager, '04. "The doctors said there was a chance, but you could tell there wasn't a lot of confidence in their voices. We took it as a signal to 'hope for the best but prepare for the worst.'"
Varda says the doctors told her family and friends to "break it to me gently when they thought I could handle it." When her father came into the room some time later, he thought she already knew.
"He said, 'So your mom told you you can't play softball, right?' And I was like, no, and he started crying," she says.
Coach Tatro says Varda mentioned playing softball from the first day.
"Softball really never crossed my mind," Tatro says. "I was surprised at how fast it crossed hers."
Reflecting on the situation later, the coach says she had great feelings of sympathy and loss for her pitcher.
"Players are an extension of our family, and that's the way I feel about all our kids here," Tatro says. "Amy finally got an opportunity as a junior, and she had what I would consider a pretty successful season. For that to be taken away from her, I felt bad for her. It just seemed like something she deserved and had earned. It was going to be her time to shine."
Varda had not given up hope of keeping her eye and taking the mound again. Two weeks after the accident, she had exploratory surgery that allowed doctors to evaluate if vision could be restored. If the retina had simply been detached, then the chances were good she would see again from her right eye.
When doctors performed a corneal transplant, they found the lens gone and the retina severely damaged. Varda now had two options — doctors could attempt to save the eye for cosmetic reasons or they could remove it and replace it with a prosthetic. The first option might look better, but she ran the risk of losing sight in the other eye at a later date. She opted for the second.
"We had decided before surgery to allow the eye to be removed if it couldn't be repaired, because I didn't want to be blind in both eyes," Varda says rather matter-of-factly.
"Practically, there was nothing else I could do. Did I want to see for the rest of my life or did I want to take the chance that, for some reason, my vision would shut down?"
Doctors wanted to remove the eye within a month of the accident because that lessens the chance of losing sight in the other eye. So, it was off to UW Hospital in Madison, where she had the eye removed, but the process of healing and dealing with the loss seems to have started from almost the first day.
Sager was by her friend's side from the outset and says that high hopes and good humor were always the order of the day.
"She was like, what can you do, move on. She was not going to let anything keep her down. It was as if nothing ever happened," Sager says.
"We would joke about it constantly, and I thought she would say, 'C'mon guys, give it a rest.' But it just got funnier and funnier. I think it helps everyone deal with it. If you're laughing about it, you're not dwelling on it."
Tatro recalls getting a Halloween gift basket from the Vardas that contained chocolate balls wrapped to look like eyeballs. The coach believes that humor was the family's way of coping and putting everyone else at ease with the situation.
"It all started with Amy, and her parents have also been extremely supportive," Tatro says. "I think they get their strength from how Amy has reacted."
Varda's mother, a nurse, stayed with her during the Fall Term as she adjusted to life with one eye. The family also expresses gratitude to Dean of Students Nancy Truesdell for all the help she gave in getting Varda set for her return to class.
Varda quickly learned that Lawrence can be a tight-knit community, in the best sense, because everyone suddenly seemed to know who she was.
"Everybody knew," she says. "If they didn't know, they asked and figured it out. People would say, 'You're Amy, right?' I didn't feel as if I was being stared at or anything, and that made it easier."
Some things would be tougher, like learning to pour a glass of milk.
"I had horrible depth perception," she says. "The first time I went to pour myself a glass of milk, I totally missed. It went all over my feet."
Once she began conquering small obstacles every day, the big stumbling block of returning to softball still loomed. Varda and her teammates started small, tossing a soft, fluffy ball around the apartment. She began working out under the supervision of Lawrence's head certified athletic trainer and assistant softball coach, Erin Buenzli. By the time softball practice started in February, Varda was set to go, including protective eyewear that she now uses both on the field and off.
"There was no fear in her," Tatro says. "A lot of people say, 'When you play afraid, you get hurt.' I don't worry about that with her, because she's not afraid. I'm probably more cautious and fearful than she will ever be.
"She still has the same air about her. It makes you really proud. It would be easy for her not to do this, but she's been an inspiration for other people on the team."
But, just how does a one-eyed pitcher find success? Varda says it really wasn't that difficult.
"It all came back very naturally. I didn't really have to re-learn anything."
She admits that her pitching style never involved a hard focus on the catcher's mitt (something coaches always took her to task for) but rather on the placement of her left foot in relation to home plate.
"The pitch is called, and I know where it's supposed to go," she says. "I could throw the pitch with my eyes closed."
Varda took the mound for the team's second game of the season and hasn't looked back, ending the season as one of the team's top two pitchers.
Which just proves that she took to heart the gift she received from the Department of Athletics: a vase filled with lemons and a card that said, "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade."