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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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