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Dallas ocularist with missing eye is a true “wounded healer”
Matt Howerton, a reporter for WFAA-TV, delivers a story of changed lives.
Randy Trawnik, who lost an eye during ROTC training in 1968, said relating to patients and helping others encouraged him to become an ocularist.
For decades, a Dallas man has been making prosthetic eyes for patients who’ve lost one, and his journey to helping others has a beginning that many of his patients can relate with.
Since the 1970s, Randy Trawnik has been changing the lives of patients who’ve been on the receiving end of terrible luck.
They all walk into his waiting room at Dallas Eye Prosthetics looking for some sort of salvation, some sort of answer or resolution that will make them whole again.
Many of them have lost an eye because of a horrible accident or due to a medical issue.
“There are no good stories walking into here,” Trawnik said. “We can make a prosthetic eye from the beginning to the end in one whole day.”
Trawnik is an ocularist and his eyes are world renowned.
He not only has an office in Dallas but one in Germany too. He’s seen patients from more than 40 countries and has even done work with children who’ve lost eyes in war-torn countries.
On the day we met Trawnik, he was helping a woman who lost her eye while living in Iraq.
“No two eyes are alike, and each one is a work of art,” Trawnik said.
And the process of creating an eye is just that–art. Contrary to popular belief, prosthetic eyes are made of plastic, not glass.
Artificial eyes have been crafted that way since World War II when injured soldiers needed them. It starts with an impression of the eye socket, and then Trawnik uses machines to carve and whittle them down to a comfortable fit.
Paint is used to match coloring, and tiny red threads are placed on the eye to create veins.
“We want to make them look as if we were never there,” Trawnik said.
Trawnik takes pride in that statement. Near his desk, he keeps photo albums of patients he’s worked with in the past.
And you’d be surprised at some of the pictures. A number include happy wedding photos, pageant winners, and models even.
When you lose an eye, Trawnik said that you don’t just lose sight, but also self-confidence.
Samuel Nishimwe, 18, can attest to that. He grew up in East Africa and lost sight in his right eye when he was young due to a genetic defect.
“We didn’t have the resources to treat it early on,” Nishimwe said.
Nishimwe moved to America in 2008, but he didn’t meet Trawnik until last year when his eye was finally removed and replaced.
“My biggest thing was self-confidence when moving to a new country,” NIshimwe said. “It was like the self-esteem I was looking for my entire life.”
It’s not easy growing up without an eye, and 9-year-old Mason Smith can tell you all about it.
His left eye had to be removed after bumping into a friend on the trampoline.
“His head hit my eye and I just started screaming,” Smith said.
Smith’s mom said it wasn’t an easy road to travel.
“Before the prosthetic, there were kids who were making fun of him,” Cindy Smith said. “His eye didn’t look real anymore.”
But bullies lose their ammunition when everything seems normal.
“My friends all said that it looks so real,” Smith said with a laugh.
“We don’t have those bullying stories anymore,” Cindy said.
For Trawnik, success stories like these are his mission or purpose, but he never knew he would be doing this until 1968.
That year, Trawnik had a terrible accident of his own during an ROTC training exercise that took his left eye.
A fellow soldier fired his weapon to close to Trawnik’s head.
“It really changed my life,” Trawnik said as he pulled out his own prosthetic. “Patients tell me that I don’t know what it’s like to have one eye and I say, ‘Yes I do,'”
Trawnik said relating to patients and helping others who’ve lost an eye encouraged him to become an ocularist.
“I’m what they call a wounded healer,” he said. “When you have a skill like this, you have an opportunity to change people’s lives.”
“This is more than just a piece of plastic.”
Byron’s Lens:
An Eye For An Eye
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Byron Harris, a 40 year reporter for WFAA-TV, writes Byron’s Lens.
Eyemaking is taught thru apprenticeship. Randy Trawnick has trained half of the ocularists in the state.
Sixty percent of the patients who come to Dallas Eye Prosthetics have lost an eye through some kind of trauma such as a gunshot, a car accident, or a mishap at work. Adult and childhood diseases cause most of the other losses. Both kinds of patients must have their prosthesis replaced several times during their lives because eyes change shape as we grow older. An infant may need a prosthetic replacement a few times a year as it grows up. Without a such size updating, a child’s face may grow asymmetrically. In older adults, the eye becomes smaller, requiring the prosthetic to be downsized.
Glass eyes are a thing of the past in the United States. Prosthetic eyes are now made of acrylic. Advances in ophthalmic surgery now often allow replacements to move with their active mate, disguising their artificiality. I was in an examination room with a mother, fathe and daughter, who were visiting the office together for the first time. Although mom had a prosthetic for years, her daughter did not know about it until the visit. The mother was in to have her prosthetic resized.
To create a properly sized replacement, an ocularist must first take an impression of where the eye used to be, using injectible, flexible molding material.
An impression is made of the cavity where the eye used to be.
That impression is used to make a mold. Which is used to make a ‘working model’ of wax.
That material is then put into a mold, which is cured and used to produce a wax facsimile of the missing ocular material, which is then inserted into the patient to check for size.
Then the “art” aspect of the “art and science” comes into play. Looking into the eye of the patient, the ocularist paints an iris to exactly match the one the patient still has. In older eyes, where veins may be visible, the ocularist may use curled strands of thread to replicate those veins.
She matches the newly painted iris to the patient. (This patient is receiving a resized prosthesis).
The painted iris is then inserted into another mold, made from the modified wax facsimile. That mold will be filled with acrylic material that will be cured to make the final prosthetic device. The eye takes shape.
John Trawnik has been working in his father’s office since he was 12. He’s becoming a central figure in the practice. Now he’s a Board Certified ocularist just like his dad.
“There’s great satisfaction in helping people feel better, ” John Trawnik says. There are only thirteen ocularists in Texas. Many states have none. Patients come to this office literally from around the world because of the renowned quality of the work, and the emotional support they receive while they’re here. Many of them have been patients for years, who visit repeatedly as their eyes change shape. Most were so comfortable with the demeanor of the staff that they let me watch the fitting process. Despite nearly two decades in the practice, John doesn’t see himself tiring of it.
Randy Travnik is not a physician but he sees his vocation as a medical and social mission.
Entire families accompany their injured parents and siblings to this office on their journey toward wholeness. When they leave, their vision may not have improved, but they see the world in a different light.
A Patient Profile:
Lauren Scruggs Kennedy
Two months after a plane propeller sliced the left side of her body, fashion blogger and one-time Gossip Girl wardrobe intern Lauren Scruggs was fitted with a prosthetic left eye today.
Her left eye and arm had to be removed after the accident. She has already undergone some reconstruction on her left face and shoulder. “It is beautiful,” Lauren’s mother Cheryl Scruggs wrote of her daughter’s new eye on the Caring Bridge website, which she updates regularly about her daughter’s recovery.
“Jeff, myself, Lo and Britt showed up at 9am at the ocularist,’ Cheryl wrote, using her daughter’s nickname, Lo. We didn’t know what to expect, other than it would be an all day process from 9 a.m – 5 p.m. Another new step. She was fitted and measured. The ocularist carefully painted and shaped the new eye. By 5 p.m., it was done, and her new eye was in place. Thank you God for providing. Bittersweet…”
She added that the family had met with professionals this week about options for a prosthetic limb. Lauren, 23, has been recovering for nearly two months since she accidentally walked in front of a plane propeller in Dallas after taking a ride with a friend to see the city’s Christmas lights.
Best of luck, Lauren. Stay strong.
Here’s a nice update
story on Lauren
Lauren Scruggs, who is a fashion blogger, found herself in the news in December 2011 after a plane propeller accident robbed her of her left eye and arm.
By Diana Pearl – People Magazine
Posted June 14, 2017
The incident left her insecure about love. “I wondered if men would ever find me attractive again,” Scruggs recently told PEOPLE.
But she made a miraculous recovery, and her journey gained national attention — including an interview on E! News in 2013. After meeting Giuliana Rancic during the show, Rancic told her she thought Scruggs should meet her co-worker, Jason Kennedy. “I didn’t know who he was. But she told me that he had this amazing Bible study in Los Angeles and had great friends,” Scruggs told PEOPLE. “She texted Jason and asked if he was going to be on set. When I was asking Giuliana about places to go hiking, she told me, ‘Just ask Jason places to go. He hikes all the time.’ ” When he showed up to set, she did ask, and Kennedy gave her a few suggestions — plus his number.
The First Date
Along with his number, Kennedy told Scruggs that he’d love to come hike with her the next day. So Scruggs, Kennedy and Scruggs’ mother went for a hike in Los Angeles. The connection, Scruggs later said, was instant. “It was such a fun hike,” Scruggs recalled. “We had the best conversation. It was funny, because Giuliana was saying, ‘I feel like you two would be so good together.’ And [after meeting him], I thought, ‘I think you might be right.’
The Long Distance
Seeing Is Believing:
Half-Blind Isaiah Austin’s Unique Journey to the NBA Draft
– bleacherreport.com
June 19, 2014
AP Images
Randy Trawnik is a world-renowned ocularist who hand-sculpts prosthetic eyes, either in his office in Dallas or in Germany. Most of the time—60 percent, he says—Trawnik works on trauma victims and patients who have developed eye problems in the early stages of their lives. Some of those have included professional athletes who are still playing today.
But in his 40 years in the profession, Trawnik has never treated someone like Isaiah Austin, 20, who started suffering blindness after injuring his right eye in a baseball accident six years ago. Now, fully blind in that eye, Austin could be one of the 60 players selected in the upcoming NBA draft. “What he has done is unbelievably unique,” said Trawnik, who lost his left eye around Austin’s age years ago when he was shot in the face during U.S. military training. Unlike his other patients who play professional sports, Trawnik said that because Austin went blind later on “he didn’t have the many years to retrain himself.”
So how did the Baylor big man overcome the loss of his sight to become one of the best shooters and shot-blockers in the country? While Austin experienced months of misery, his recovery was fueled by a relentless drive for a sport he loved, a strong network of family, friends and coaches, some science and good genes.
Isaiah Austin has been a regular at Mo Williams Academy in Dallas in the weeks preceding the draft. Jared ZwerlingThe Journey Begins
The root of Austin’s disability started with an accident while he was playing a position he had never experienced before: first base. Austin had been attending a summer baseball camp in 2005 when he was 11 years old, and he was placed at first base because of his height. “I think they thought I was older just because I was so tall, so they put me in the older kids’ group,” the soft-spoken Austin said over breakfast recently in Arlington, Texas, near where he resides. “I was on first base, and I remember the pitcher kept faking it to me. I was like, ‘What is he doing?’ I really hadn’t played baseball that long, so I didn’t know that the pitcher can throw it back to first and try to get the person out. “So he faked the pitch and he threw it, and I put my glove up like a half-a-second late, and the ball just smashed into my eye.”
Austin went to the hospital because his eye swelled up and his contact lens got stuck. Doctors said he had a loose retina. But no surgery was required; he was simply told to monitor any pain. Little did he know, his eye would gradually get worse In February 2008, everything came crashing down. It was the last game of his middle school basketball career, and Austin had never dunked during layup lines. That’s because there was a strict rule against it: two technical fouls, and you’re out of the game. But working off of adrenaline, Austin took off, cuffed the ball back with his left hand and jammed it down. The crowd went wild and a double tech ensued, but no one but Austin knew what he immediately saw out of his right eye: red. It was blood. The powerful nature of the uncontested dunk had detached his retina, which was the diagnosis the next morning when he went to the emergency room. “Throughout the years, we didn’t know it, but [his eye] was getting more and more loosened,” Austin’s mother, Lisa Green, said. “The dunk was the last straw.”
Courtesy of Lisa Green
Dallas ophthalmologist Dr. Gregory Kozielec, who has treated Mavericks players through the years, was the first to repair Austin’s retina the day after his emergency room visit. Dr. Kozielec called the situation “one of the worst cases I had in 20 years.” While 99 percent of his consultations involve spontaneous detachments to people who are nearsighted, older in age and have a family history of the condition, Austin was an extremely rare patient.
“When I first saw him, his eye was a disaster. It was a DEFCON 1 detachment,” Dr. Kozielec said. “A detachment is almost like wallpaper peeling off the back of a wall. In young kids, that comes off pretty rapidly and becomes a big disaster. He saw red, and he already had an eye that had been injured from his previous baseball injury. “When he came in, it was completely detached, and he already lost vision. So he basically was blind walking into my office on Monday evening. We fixed it, but unfortunately, as young kids can do, it detached again [later on], and then from that point it was just a struggle effect. He had a bad prognosis to begin with.”
Austin went on to have four more operations that year in an attempt to save his eye: to further fix it; to remove silicone oil that’s used for serious detachments and keeps the retina intact; to correct a cataract; and then to clean out scar issue, which was the last operation, in June 2008. By then, Austin’s vision had actually been restored—but not before going through days of excruciating pain after each surgery.
Courtesy of Dr. Gregory Kozielec
“It felt like needles in your eye. That was the most painful part,” he said. “The first four-to-five days after the surgery, it was terrible. They give you some painkillers after, but it doesn’t really help. You try to sleep it off as much as you can.”
After going under the knife each time, Austin went through a longer extreme challenge. For his eye to heal afterward, he was required to lay face down for essentially 24 hours a day for weeks at a time. No exercise was allowed in order to prevent any stress to his eye. He could really only get up to use the bathroom. His father, Ben, would pick up his homework at the middle school and help him study while he lay down. His family even placed a mirror on the floor next to a special massage-like table he had to lay on so he could watch TV and see who was coming into his room.
The Austin family: Noah, Isaiah, Ben, Lisa and Narrah.Courtesy of Lisa Green
It was Austin’s close-knit family, who had recently moved to Texas, who helped him get through the ordeal—even though there were many tough, teary-eyed nights. But they prayed a lot together, with the positive-minded Green always reaffirming to her son, “The belief part is easy; the trusting is where the journey begins.”
Austin’s brother Noah, who’s now 15 and a standout track runner, and his sister, Narrah, who’s 11 and a talented artist, entertained their oldest sibling by making him laugh and smile. For Mother’s Day that year, Narrah decorated a colorful shoebox for Austin to express her love for him. Noah would call Austin “his superhero,” and they played video games together. “They were always by my side,” Austin said. “My little brother and sister would come in my room and just spend hours of the day just to be with me.” The biggest motivator was Austin himself. “He just toughed it up,” Green said. The light at the end of the tunnel was basketball.
“It’s just like any other person: They’ll do anything for something that they love,” Austin said. “I loved the game of basketball and I didn’t feel like giving up on it, so I just wanted to continue to play. … And my two best friends, who are twins, Elliot and Elijah Dickrell, were like, ‘Man, you’re the best basketball player we know. You can’t give up or quit on us.'”
Following his final operation, which repaired his vision, Austin was the weakest he had ever been, but he had the rest of the summer to regain some of his strength and conditioning. By November 2008, at Mansfield Legacy High School, he returned to the court and was the only freshman to make the varsity team. A big plus was that he was 6’11”. That season, Austin had his coming-out party when he finished with 16 points and 12 rebounds in a win over top-ranked Duncanville High School.
Life Changed, Forever
Austin’s right eye remained stable until September 2009, when he was a sophomore at Grace Prep Academy. At that point, scar tissue was pulling the retina back off again. That’s when Austin’s real moment of truth arrived: He could go through another surgery — maybe more than one—with no guarantees, or cope with the reality that the vision in his eye would eventually be lost with nothing done. “That’s when he said, ‘Enough’s enough,'” Dr. Kozielec recalls. “He had already been through hell. He had reached his level of acceptance.He reached a level of I can’t do anything more for this eye, which requires more face-down, more time away from sports. He felt like ‘I know who I’m going to be—I’m going to be great at what I do and I need to move on.’ “It was a tough decision to say, ‘I’ll see you in six months [for a checkup],’ rather than, ‘I’ll see you next week [for surgery].'”
Austin, especially, couldn’t imagine laying down for long stretches again. In fact, he avoids sleeping like that today. “I never lay on my stomach anymore, like ever,” he said.
Isaiah Austin credits his high school coach, Ray Forsett, with inspiring him to play despite the loss of vision in his right eye. Jared Zwerling
When it came to basketball, though, Austin began to struggle adjusting to his diminishing sight. He needed a push, which came from Grace Prep’s basketball coach, Ray Forsett. Austin said before that time he was too much of a passive player, but Forsett “really brought that dog out of me.”
“My biggest thing with him was, ‘You made it this far, so why give up? You have a special gift. Keep pushing, keep working, hold your head up, there’s nothing to be afraid of,'” said Forsett, who had never coached a player with a disability before Austin. “On the court, I’ve never given him that as an excuse. It was always, ‘You’re a player. When you get on the floor, you’re just like everybody else — two eyes, everything — so you’re going to make plays happen.’ When I first got him, he said, ‘You’re crazy, coach.’ But he was able to do it with no excuses and no complaints.”
Green called Austin’s meeting Forsett the “turning point in Isaiah’s basketball career. Ray Forsett was really the one that gave Isaiah the confidence to be the best that he can be, and saying that nobody can challenge him and he can get just better and better,” she said. Forsett encouraged Austin to establish himself further on the national scene at the prestigious City of Palms tournament in the winter of 2010. After being down 20 points at halftime to top-ranked Mater Dei High School, Forsett had a heart-to-heart talk with Austin, who said, ”But I can only see out of one eye.” Forsett responded, ”Stop making excuses for it.” Austin shot around 80 percent for the rest of the game, and Grace Prep came back to win in overtime. The next day, they upset another powerhouse, Montverde Academy. “That moment in him is when he became a superhero,” Forsett said. “He just controlled and just dominated the game, and he was playing against guys with both eyes.”
Over time, without any more procedures, Austin’s eye started drooping more and changed color from brown to gray to finally blue—the process of an eye dying. It had shrunk to the point where he had no pupil during his junior year. He was officially blind in his right eye—a moment he knew would come.
Randy Trawnik and his son, John, at their Dallas lab.Jared Zwerling
“That’s when he said, ‘Mom, you’ve got to do something because people are going to start talking,'” Green recalled. “And so that’s when we went to get a prosthetic eye at the end of his junior year [in 2011].” Luckily for Austin, he had the local cosmetic services of Trawnik, who along with his staff of two — his son, John, and colleague Sarah — designs prosthetic eyes by hand. “We paint the iris with different colors of pigment,” said Trawnik, to whom Austin was referred to by Dr. Kozielec. “The eye is lots of pigment all pushed together. Digital ones look flat. Ours look 3-D.” When Austin came to the office, Trawnik took an impression of his eye socket—the only step required for a patient, which is not painful—and then his team went to work, designing his prosthetic eye made of polymethyl methacrylate (acrylic glass) in about a day.
Trawnik vividly remembers Austin’s and Green’s reactions upon seeing him look in a mirror with his new prosthetic eye when they were together in his office. “Isaiah is not very demonstrative, but what’s more fun than anything else is putting a mirror in front of him and seeing a smile on that young man’s face,” he said. “And his mother was crying. She’s a great lady.” Trawnik added a special design element for Austin: an appropriate gaze so that when he looks down, which he does a lot being that he’s taller than most people at 7’1″, it still looks like a normal eye. Because the nerves behind his right eye still work, the prosthetic—which is removable, professionally cleaned once a year and needs to be replaced every 5-10 years—moves along with it.
A sampling of the prosthetic eyes Randy Trawnik designs at his clinic in Dallas. Jared Zwerling
“You can’t get 3-D vision, but what you do is compensate by movement,” Trawnik said. “He’s always moving. By movement, he’s changing angles, checking this and that. If he sits still, his depth of vision is reduced, but if he’s constantly moving, he has calculations going on all the time.” Even though Austin tested 20/20 in his left eye at the NBA Draft Combine in Chicago, it hasn’t become stronger to compensate for his other eye, according to Dr. Kozielec. Instead, Austin has learned to pick up certain cues, such as basing distances on shadows in comparison to other objects. That’s why he takes the court much earlier than other players before games to gauge the arena’s lighting and depth perception behind the basket. “It just takes me a couple shots to get used to where I’m at,” he said. “I can’t just walk into a gym and just have perfect depth perception. I have to go and test it out.”
Green believes that through the disability he’s improved other senses as well. “It’s mind over matter,” she said. “When you lose a sense, they always talk about that sixth sense. If I’m walking on the right side, before he wouldn’t even hesitate to know I’m there. But now I think he’s more aware that someone is on his right side even if he can’t see them. And because he’s so mathematically inclined — his favorite subjects were math and science — I think in his head he’s always calculating things when he’s playing. He always keeps his head on a swivel. So I think he’s become a better player overall.” Dr. Kozielec said those roughly six months after Austin’s retina issue resurfaced in September were the most challenging for Austin, as he attempted to find his way on the court. But even while dealing with some left-eye strain at times, he didn’t let up practicing and developed the muscle memory to be successful, remarkably so with shooting — an area which maximizes eye-hand coordination.
By his senior year in 2012, Austin was the No. 3 overall recruit in the country, as ranked by ESPN, right behind current NBA players Nerlens Noel (Philadelphia 76ers) and Shabazz Muhammad (Minnesota Timberwolves), and ahead of Steven Adams (Oklahoma City Thunder) and Anthony Bennett (Cleveland Cavaliers). “I never thought he’d be at the level he’s at,” Dr. Kozielec said. “It’s almost impossible, because you’re so used to your whole life having two eyes and developing all these cues. The level he’s playing at and the length of time that he’s had this problem, I think he’s pretty much almost good as new.”
Austin has taken cues from others who have a prosthetic eye, like Lauren Scruggs, a blogger and fashion journalist who received international attention after she accidentally walked into a moving airplane propeller in 2011 and lost her left eye. They met through Trawnik. Another time, a movie director with a prosthetic eye — Austin doesn’t remember his name — approached him at an airport, and they shared stories. “We talked for a while,” he said. “That was pretty cool.”
Inspiring Others
Emmanuel Mudiay and Isaiah Austin. Courtesy of Isaiah Austin
Emmanuel Mudiay — the No. 5 recruit in the class of 2014 and Austin’s former teammate at Grace Prep who has signed on to play for Larry Brown at SMU—remembers one time in practice with Austin when he covered one of his own eyes and tried to shoot. He couldn’t do it. It was a moment that helped Mudiay further understand “how amazing” Austin was. His trainer, Djamel Jackson, tried the same thing at a different time. No success. “I was blown away, man,” Jackson said. “Being human, I started closing my eye and trying to do some of the stuff. It’s tough. I put my hand over my eye and I couldn’t do nothing. I started realizing how special the kid was.”
Up until this year, Austin kept his blindness private to all but his Grace Prep and Baylor teammates. The colleges that recruited him didn’t even know. He never wanted it to be an excuse for people to feel sorry for him. While Austin knew he would need to reveal his condition publicly before declaring for the draft, he thought this year was the right time to do so because he wanted to first prove that he had matured as a basketball player — not a basketball player with a disability. That was one of two main reasons why he didn’t enter the draft after his freshman season — the other was a six-month recovery from last May to September after right-shoulder surgery.
After leading Baylor to the NIT as a freshman, he took them to the Sweet 16 this season by expanding his game on the defensive end. “I just feel like I’m just a completely different player,” he said. “Even though some of my [offensive] stats were down [this season], I still feel like I developed on the court. I have a knack for the game now. My team really didn’t need me to be a priority scorer like I was my freshman year. They needed me to block shots and control the paint on defense, and that’s what I did. I changed my game. I evolved for us so we could go on a winning streak.”
When Austin revealed his blindness on ESPN in January, the letters started pouring into Baylor from all across the country. He said one woman sent him a series of poems about “encouraging, strengthening and having the willpower and faith in God.”
Isaiah Austin won a lot of new admirers with his admission that he is blind in one eye, including a number of young Baylor fans. Courtesy of Lisa Green
“So I’ve got like a bunch of fan mail with people saying they respect my story and stuff like that,” Austin said. “That’s really what, for me, what life is about — seeing all the people that you can help, inspire and touch across the world. It’s really crazy.” Austin, who didn’t expect to have as big of an impact as he did, hopes to motivate many more. “I think I’m going to come out with a book eventually—me and my mom have been talking about that—but right now, I just want to use [my story] to take me as far as I can go and help inspire a lot of people. I plan on going to hospitals in whatever cities I’m in, I plan on having conversations with elementary school kids. I had a couple of speaking segments when I went to Michigan. I went to a couple of elementary schools there. That’s what I’m trying to do right now.” Austin’s siblings have been moved by their older brother. They both want to be doctors when they grow up: Noah, a neurosurgeon, and Narrah, a scientist. “Isaiah really inspired them to want to do better and to help other people,” Green said.
Even Dr. Kozielec was touched by Austin’s ascension. “I can’t wrap my mind around where he’s at. It’s just unreal,” he said. “He’s motivated me to know that maybe there is hope in very difficult situations with other patients.”
The Next Step: The NBA
When Austin was at the NBA combine in Chicago, team officials wondered the same thing anyone would crossing paths with him: How do you do it? Austin said he was taken aback with the overall reaction. “It surprised me how many people said that they were on my side and rooting for me,” he said. “Even teams that didn’t have interest in me, they said that they were rooting for me and hoped that I had a long career.”
That positive vibe has carried over to Austin’s workouts with the Boston Celtics, Dallas Mavericks, Detroit Pistons, Memphis Grizzlies, Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs. He has about six more to come, according to his agent, Dwon Clifton, who worked for the Baylor basketball team between 2008 and 2010, before Austin arrived on campus. Clifton said teams are looking past his eye. “At this point, the teams that he’s worked out for, a lot of them like him,” Clifton said. “He’s kind of in the mix for everyone. The feedback hasn’t been, ‘Hey, this guy is ready to play right away,’ but the only thing you need is a team to believe in you as a project to give you an opportunity, and the rest is up to him.”
Austin said the thought of hearing his name called on June 26 gives him “goose bumps.” He might travel to New York City for the big night or stay back to watch with his family in Dallas or Kansas City, where Green lives. With Austin’s obvious skills—his size, 7’3″ wingspan, shooting and shot-blocking — there’s the thought that he could further revolutionize the stretch-5 position, like 6’11” center Pero Antic did this season for the Atlanta Hawks, who nearly upset the Indiana Pacers in the first round of the playoffs. There’s also the New Orleans Pelicans’ versatile All-Star big man Anthony Davis, whom Austin watches a lot on video.
Clifton said teams have also been impressed with Austin’s low-post footwork and finishing. Jackson has challenged Austin to learn the type of back-to-the-basket moves made famous by Hakeem Olajuwon and Dirk Nowitzki. Sometimes, Jackson will be watching a clip of one of those two NBA legends and text Austin about what he sees. “‘We’ve got to go over this Olajuwon stuff in the morning,'” Jackson said he’ll tell Austin. “And he’s like, ‘I’m up. I can be at the gym in 10 minutes.’ We’ve worked until two in the morning. He learns fast. I can cover a lot of stuff with him.”
While Jackson said there are times when Austin looks flustered after missing a couple of shots in a row, he said his student never complains about his eye; he only compensates. Mudiay saw the same quality in high school and learned that if you “just give him a couple touches early on, he’s going to feel good about himself as the game goes on. He plays through [the frustration],” Jackson said. “He’s a tough kid.”
Isaiah Austin works on the Vertimax machine to improve his vertical leap. Jared Zwerling
Austin has adopted the same mentality approaching a draft that might have seen his stock drop after he admitted to being half-blind. “I just want an opportunity to play for a team,” he said. “Only 60 people get picked, and half of them don’t even stay in the league. So I really just want to stay in the league and have a nice career. But at the same time, I know basketball isn’t for everyone. I know the ball is going to stop bouncing, so I just want to use it as a stepping stone for my life.”
Mind Power
Tattooed on one of Austin’s arms is the passage from 2 Corinthians 5:7: “For we walk by faith, not by sight,” along with other Biblical words on both of his arms. They’re written facing him, so he can read them whenever he wants. “Whenever I get down, I just look down at my arm and it reminds me of what I’ve been through,” he said.
While Austin is not likely to harm his left eye from straining to compensate for his right and will continue to wear protective glasses during games, that’s the least of his worries. Even if one day way down the line technology for an eye transplant is available, Austin is satisfied with the man that he has become. “I’m not scared of anything,” he said. “I’m not scared of getting hurt or anything because whatever happens is going to happen. I have a strong enough mindset to get through anything. The fact of the matter is I’m not even supposed to be here in this position that I am, so I’m really blessed to even say that I’ve gone through all those things.
“Life goes on, man.”
The pretty little girl saw two things in the mirror that day. A black hole where her eye used to be. And a nurse’s horrified face, reflected behind her.
Even at 9, she knew she it was the worst thing the woman had ever seen. Even at 9, she knew to ask herself: “What am I now?”
More than two decades later, she slips into the chair across from me in an Austin restaurant, a fashion model who is confident enough in her beauty that she wears no makeup. Her deep brown eyes are perfect twins.
Not one of her thousands of followers on Instagram, where she models like a beautiful, empowered tiger, or stylists who’ve lined her eyes in black for shoots, or long-ago best friends at an Ivy League university, and certainly no one in this restaurant, know about that night as a kid when her world exploded. She remembers that her mother did not want her to go outside when fireworks began to pop on her grandmother’s Oklahoma property. She remembers feeling oddly lucky that the errant missile was so precise that it didn’t scar her skin—and that the surgeons who worked on her after a frantic trip to the ER were now practiced at traumatic eye injury because of skills newly forged out of the terrorist bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.
What if the bombing had been later? Or never at all? What if she’d stayed inside like her mother wanted? What if, what if, what if?
Critical eye muscles were saved that night. Because of the way eyes are wired, if the doctors had been too late or not good enough, her other eye could have gone blind in sympathy. But it was a man in Dallas with his own redemptive story who perhaps made her the most whole—who leaned close to her face with a small, white acrylic shell, a brush, and palette of paints, and created a perfectly fitted illusion.
He gave her a secret to keep.
•
– For his wife, a St. Louis Cardinals fan, Trawnik personalized her prosthetic eye with a cardinal sipping a mini Gloria’s margarita. For other clients, he’s added a rose, a butterfly, and a Winnie-the-Pooh. –
When I began my latest novel, I didn’t expect it to redefine my perceptions of physical beauty and strength. I thought I had no preconceived judgments about human beings who roll into a restaurant in a wheelchair or walk by me with a prosthetic leg. I thought my instinct to feel sorry for their loss and briefly mourn a tragedy of fate meant I was a kind and evolved human being. I even had skin in the game—a foreign object in my own chest, a pacemaker inserted at 27 for a congenital heart condition. Hidden scars. A near-death experience. For years, I’d defy people who thought I should back up and live a lesser life. I fought not to be defined by it.
We Are All the Same in the Dark certainly started out the way all my novels do, with a tiny vision, a dark mood about humanity, and a desire to be authentic. In researching my books, I’ve dug into everything from the Texas death penalty to the trickery of dementia to the use of mitochondrial DNA to identify old and degraded bones.
An imaginary girl with one eye had haunted my mind for three months before I decided to pay attention. I couldn’t see her face in context; I just knew what she was missing. She was evolving, full-bodied in a white dress, blowing dandelions, making wishes. I began to write, to drive her beyond a cliché. I was almost immediately stuck. I thought about drawing in her other eye.
So I consider it fortunate that I didn’t give up on her, that I sent an email into the ether and made a wish of my own—for the Picasso of Eyes to talk to me. I didn’t know until I hit Google, but Randy Trawnik, a world-renowned ocularist, lived a half-hour away from me in Dallas. In the world of eye prosthetics, he was famous and sought after, painting and creating eyes for Saudi Arabian royalty, actresses, models, beauty queens, and athletes.
Isaiah Austin, once one of America’s best college basketball players, used to roam the court with one of Randy’s eyes, adapting, darting, fooling opponents trying to guard a half-blind superhero.
Lauren Scruggs Kennedy, now a New York Times best-selling author and popular lifestyle influencer, wound up in his chair after stepping out of a small plane and straight into a propeller blade, losing both an eye and a hand after a night ride to view holiday lights over North Texas in 2011. At age 23, she shot onto the national news as a miracle survivor, no secrets to keep and a new torch to hold. She struggled back to life in a hospital bed, describing her brain turning back on “like a string of old Christmas lights that sparked and fizzled.”
It took only a 16th of an inch of a whirring blade to tear up her life. What if she’d stepped just a little bit more in one direction or the other? She’d be untouched—or dead.
Trawnik also helps the much less famous, children who are victims of car crashes, guns, abuse, genetic disorders, a stick out of nowhere. Trawnik allows them to maneuver the tribal phase of childhood with a pretty piece of armor. His artistry with a brush—not a 3D printer, not a computer—lets many walk around as anonymously as they like.
My character had a name by now. Angel. She had blown 17 wishes on those dandelions. And they were all the same one.
•
The girl is cute, casual, easy, wearing her sunglasses under the fluorescent office lights while she waits for me to begin the interview. Rightly, because who am I, a perfect stranger, to see her without her prosthesis, at her most vulnerable? She does not want her name used.
I think I am more nervous than she is. She has worn a prosthetic eye almost since birth.
Trawnik is in a room down the hall, finishing her new replacement eye in his lab. The four-hour journey to his office every few years is an intimate ritual for her and her parents. They eat at the same place for lunch each time, make a day of it, and explain its profound meaning to very few people. Maybe it can’t be explained.
No, the girl tells me, I choose not to tell anyone but my closest friends. People I trust. I wear goggles for sports. It isn’t that hard.
I’m talking to a perfectly regular teenager, tugging out her words. I turn to her mother, carefully monitoring my interview, and ask her to describe her daughter. The words fall out like water.
Tender, resilient, strong, resourceful, kind, empathetic.
I scribble them down. Not regular at all.
•
Randy Trawnik likes to say that if he does his job right, no one ever knows he was there. And if patients say he doesn’t understand what they are feeling, he reaches in and pulls out his own eye.
Trawnik imagined an ambitious future as an Army officer before the boy beside him in a ROTC exercise shot off a gun too close to his head. Trawnik spiraled, every dream deferred because the military didn’t want a brilliant young man with one eye. He drifted in a local college, pounding the books and the darkness, studying art.
One day, he dropped by his childhood home with a load of laundry. His mother was waiting and wanted a favor. She asked him to walk down the street to comfort the 9-year-old granddaughter of a neighbor who had just lost her eye. The answer from Trawnik was a resounding no.
She is scared, his mother said. That didn’t move Trawnik. A small battle ensued. Finally, she laid it on the line: If you don’t go, I won’t do your laundry.
When he returned, something had shifted for good. He talked to the girl for two hours, starting to heal himself in the process. She would be the first of countless people Trawnik helped put back together because he never strapped on a military uniform and went to war.
Trawnik calls himself an illusionist. He calls his life “providential.” He points out that there are no happy stories sitting in his waiting room. It’s a little war room in itself. But when a patient turns toward the mirror for the first time with a new eye, it is straight out of a movie. Hugs. Tears. For everyone, including him.
•
Randy Trawnik likes to say that if he does his job right, no one ever knows he was there. And if patients say he doesn’t understand what they are feeling, he reaches in and pulls out his own eye.
Trawnik imagined an ambitious future as an Army officer before the boy beside him in a ROTC exercise shot off a gun too close to his head. Trawnik spiraled, every dream deferred because the military didn’t want a brilliant young man with one eye. He drifted in a local college, pounding the books and the darkness, studying art.
One day, he dropped by his childhood home with a load of laundry. His mother was waiting and wanted a favor. She asked him to walk down the street to comfort the 9-year-old granddaughter of a neighbor who had just lost her eye. The answer from Trawnik was a resounding no.
She is scared, his mother said. That didn’t move Trawnik. A small battle ensued. Finally, she laid it on the line: If you don’t go, I won’t do your laundry.
When he returned, something had shifted for good. He talked to the girl for two hours, starting to heal himself in the process. She would be the first of countless people Trawnik helped put back together because he never strapped on a military uniform and went to war. (continued in right column)
Trawnik calls himself an illusionist. He calls his life “providential.” He points out that there are no happy stories sitting in his waiting room. It’s a little war room in itself. But when a patient turns toward the mirror for the first time with a new eye, it is straight out of a movie. Hugs. Tears. For everyone, including him.
•
In the world of eye prosthetics, Trawnik is famous and sought after, painting and creating eyes for Saudi Arabian royalty, actresses, models, beauty queens, and athletes.
I had many things wrong when I began to draw my own one-eyed girl. Prosthetic eyes are not made of glass but acrylic. They are not round but shaped like a giant contact lens and cast to fit each patient’s eye socket. The ocularist is not a doctor but an artist, mixing colors to find the perfect match to nature’s, adding in delicate gold flecks or pale streaks, layering translucent lacquer for a 3D effect. The blood vessels are made of tiny red threads. In Trawnik’s office, it’s a one-day process to cast, paint, and put the eye in place. He believes no one should have to wait a second longer to feel whole. Adjusting to the new lack of depth perception with one eye to shoot a ball, drive a car, fool everyone—completely possible.
And it is perfectly OK to keep a big secret like this, to believe that most people think, like Shakespeare, that the eyes are the windows to the soul. To not want to be defined at first glance by what you are missing. It’s also OK to hope that the idea of physical beauty is evolving. That a missing body part or a jagged scar will someday not be about something lost but simply part of the architecture of a human story.
•
At 13, Karen Weber was being cautious, glancing right and left down a dark basement hall at a church event for teenagers, afraid a kid would jump out at her. What came flying was a smashed Ping-Pong ball.
What if she had blinked? Turned her head slightly?
Instead, that simple act destroyed her lens. The last thing she saw out of her right eye was a Goldfish cracker streaked with squiggly red lines. Then black.
The eye shriveled, and it was finally removed. When she began ninth grade, she wore a pirate patch while everything healed. She remembers one boy who asked when he passed her in the hall: “Where’s your cat-o’-nine?” referring to a whip. She zinged back: “In my locker.”
What she calls her “teddy bear eye” was the next step up, a cheap prosthesis picked from a drawer of brown eyes, blank and staring, simply the one that matched her other eye best. It fooled no one. Several years later, a boy in the pool flicked that eye with his foot.
What if he hadn’t?
The teddy bear eye was damaged. It had to go. Weber found herself in Trawnik’s chair for the first time. She was 17. He was 26, just beginning.
It is Weber who, decades later, removes her eye and texts me pictures of the bare tissue so I describe it right in my book, who tactfully corrects me on details. She will be the one who laughs a lot, tells me dark, funny jokes, and seems past all bitterness, and I can’t tell that she had any to begin with.
A year after the accident, the boy who threw the Ping-Pong ball into the long shadows walked up to Weber and apologized. She had a crush on him before this happened, which made it worse. The cute boy was standing there, struggling, telling her he was sorry.
“It was an accident.”
She gave him those four words of forgiveness and never saw the boy again. But Trawnik she saw over and over, for at least 12 more eyes. Forty years after they met, something shifted here, too. They fell in love and married.
•
Randy Trawnik likes to say that if he does his job right, no one ever knows he was there. And if patients say he doesn’t understand what they are feeling, he reaches in and pulls out his own eye.
Disabled. Disability. Differently abled.
Lauren Scruggs Kennedy hates every one of these labels. “Why can’t we all just be people?” she says. “ ‘Disabled’ puts people in a box. I’ve met many people [with prosthetics] who are much more capable than people with all of their limbs.”
An avid boxer, she says that with one less eye and hand she can do anything she did before other than pound a nail in the wall to hang a picture. When she walked into that propeller blade in Dallas almost nine years ago, Kennedy says, she at first didn’t understand why she was “an inspiration.” Why the Today show was calling. Why this fame was happening to her at 23 years old when she was at her most devastated, enduring brain, hand, and eye surgeries. Kennedy became such a media storm that the hospital had to post security.
Trawnik was just as determined to protect her the day he met her at his office, bringing her in for an appointment when no one else was around. She says he understood her emotions in ways others couldn’t. He not only painted her a beautiful matching blue eye, he reassured her that her life had more purpose than ever. He knew.
Today, she uses her platform to deliver a resonant message about a nontoxic lifestyle and the definition of real beauty. Her personal life has spun in a happy direction, too. She married national entertainment journalist Jason Kennedy in 2014, after a chance meeting on the set of E! News, where she was being interviewed about the accident.
Kennedy says that doesn’t mean there still aren’t personal demons to bat away, a “lot of lies in her head” about physical perfection that were established before the accident. It is still sometimes a struggle to feel confident. “Who am I trying to look good for?” she asks herself on those days. Recently, Kennedy tested out her insecurity by walking outside to talk to the man mowing her lawn without her prosthetic arm attached.
She makes it clear: for even the most enlightened cheerleaders for change—and Kennedy is that times 100—the pressure to be the physical stereotype of beauty keeps thumping away. It is this honesty that makes Kennedy, well, so lovely. It is what makes her so appealing to the young girls with lost limbs she is on a mission to help.
In her book Still Lolo, Kennedy writes that it was a child who buoyed her in the beginning. She was speaking to third-graders at a Dallas school not long after her accident. A boy asked to see her bared arm, the one without a hand, which he examined with great interest.
There would be more conversations, more what ifs, in the months of book research that followed my first interview with the girl in the mirror. I was hypnotized by the TED Talk “My 12 Pairs of Legs,” with Aimee Mullins, an athlete, actress, and activist for a more noble and innovative human race. Mullins was born with missing fibula bones and had both legs amputated below the knee when she was just 1.
I’d let her words roll over me at night after a long day of writing: “What does a beautiful woman have to look like? What is a sexy body? … We need to move away from replicating humanness as the aesthetic ideal.” She strolls the stage casually on two stunning legs, pushing a new conversation—that in our blazing high-tech world, wearing prosthetics is not about deficiency and loss but about augmentation and empowerment.
A ferocious heroine began to take shape out of these real-life women—and then a second heroine just as flawed and determined. There was no way for my characters to feel, no single way to be. That was my biggest misconception about wearing a prosthesis. The word “disabled” applies to all of us or none of us.
The characters in this novel would be different from my others and also exactly the same, human beings fighting through terrible dust-ups on our journeys to make us whole.
I kept returning to the girl in the mirror. What am I now? she asked herself. Still beautiful. Only more.
•
Two years ago, I was signing a book for a woman at the launch for Paper Ghosts, my last thriller. In my talk, I had mentioned the research into prosthetics I was beginning for We Are All the Same in the Dark. “Is the ocularist you were talking about Randy Trawnik?” the woman asked.
I looked up from signing, surprised, straight into striking eyes. “Yes. Do you know him?” She winked.
•
Lauren Scruggs Kennedy teamed with her friend and professional surfer Bethany Hamilton, who lost her arm to a shark at 13, to create a network for girls who have lost limbs. The eighth annual Beautifully Flawed retreat is scheduled for October. Kennedy is also co-founder of the Lauren Scruggs Kennedy Foundation, which provides girls who can’t afford it a cosmetic sleeve that is specially sculpted to cover their own prosthesis, matches their skin, and gives them a more natural-looking arm. We Are All the Same in the Dark, Heaberlin’s sixth novel, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. It will be published on August 11. Write to feedback@dmagazine.com.
Windows to the Soul
By BILL MARVEL Staff Writer
Published April 3, 2005
Dallas Morning News
Randy Trawnik bends closer, closer, closer, until he is almost nose to nose with Narin Haji. He stares intently, and the 12-year-old girl stares back. Neither seems particularly embarrassed by this very close encounter, which continues for several seconds.
Ronahi Abdullah watches as Mr. Trawnik takes a close look at the prosthetic eye he has made for her 12-year-old daughter Narin Haji.
Then Mr. Trawnik jumps up and walks out of the room. Moments later he is back holding a small object in his hand. He sits and once again bends closer, closer. The object is Narin’s eye – or soon will be. He gently slides it into the empty socket, then hands the girl a mirror. She looks, and a shy smile begins to spread across her face.
Narin, whose family came to Dallas from Iraq during the first Gulf War, injured her left eye when she was 2, in an encounter with a glass coffee table. For years the family lived with a dilemma: To try to save the eye, which no longer functioned? Or to have it removed? And then what?
The answer was removal, around Christmas, and now replacement with an artificial eye, created by Randy Trawnik, who is one of only a handful of certified ocularists in Texas. That means he can fashion an artificial eye, an “eye prosthesis,” from scratch. (Please don’t call it a glass eye; they make them out of acrylic plastics these days.)
Bankers and beauty queens come to Mr. Trawnik. He has been eye-to-eye with the chief of police of Oman, a Saudi princess and a national television news personality whose name he will not divulge. And with lots of infants and toddlers. You’d be amazed how many humans are born into the world without an eye.
He has leatherette albums filled with photographs – graduation photos, wedding photos, class portraits, snapshots with thank-you notes. But it is the before-and-after photos that amaze. One would not guess the absence or presence of an eye would make so much difference. But it does.
“People without eyes are treated differently,” he says. And he should know.
An accident
Ocularist Randy Trawnik removes the artificial eye of 6-year-old patient Brianna Thompson.
He aimed to be a soldier. Enrolled in high school ROTC, full of hopes for an appointment to West Point, he was attending a military exercise May 31, 1968 – “I’ll never forget that date” – when somebody’s rifle went off. It was only a blank, and Trawnik was just turning his head, but the charge caught the side of his face, splitting his nose and taking out his left eye and a chunk of his ear.
Embittered, he switched career goals and eventually enrolled in the University of Texas at Arlington intending to become an advertising artist. “One day,” he recalls, “one of my neighbor’s granddaughters lost her eye to a BB gun. BB guns are the bane of my existence.
The neighbor called his mother, and she suggested the child talk to Randy.
“At spring break, I came home from college with a sack of dirty laundry and a bad attitude,” he says. His mother asked him to talk to the girl who had lost an eye. “I said, ‘I won’t do it.’ She said, ‘Then I won’t do your laundry.'”
The neighbor’s granddaughter was 10 years old and in tears. “Hey, it’s not so bad,” Mr. Trawnik told her. “How do you know?” she demanded. So he took out his eye and showed her.
“I still had all those demons from my own loss,” he says. “But afterward I thought, ‘Hey, this felt pretty good.'”
The same weekend, Mr. Trawnik got a phone call from the ocularist who had fashioned his own eye. John H. O’Donnell was looking for an assistant, a sort of apprentice whom he could train. Would Mr. Trawnik be interested? It was, he recalls, as though a door had suddenly opened.
Decades later, he still paints pictures occasionally. A watercolor, an original Trawnik, hangs on the wall of the busy reception room in his fourth-floor office in a Preston Center office tower. But he’s more likely to be mixing pigments from a rainbow array of jars and stroking them onto a tiny foil disk. Working with a No. 00 sable brush, one of the finest Winsor & Newton makes, he alternates layers of pigment and transparent plastic, striving for the luminous effect of the living iris.
Forget what the song lyrics and the driver’s licenses say: Nobody has eyes that are blue or brown or green. Every human eye is a unique blend of colors, Mr. Trawnik says, and that blend will subtly shift over a lifetime, from the vivid colors of a toddler’s eyes to the fading hues of the elderly.
“I train ocularists, and the one thing I tell my students is: Being an artist means learning how to see. You have to dissect form, color, depth, space, because a prosthesis is all those things.”
It’s important to get it right because we human beings read one another through the eyes.
Eye power
Inez Evans of Longview, Texas, smiles after taking her first look at the prosthetic eye that Mr. Trawnik has just fitted for her.
Inez Evans knows that well. She is seated in the chair now, next to Mr. Trawnik’s desk, and once again he is leaning closer … closer.
Mrs. Evans drove in from Longview with her husband this morning. She lost her right eye as the result of a series of strokes. Before lunch, Mr. Trawnik studied her remaining eye, then took a wax impression of her eye socket and cast the plaster mold from which the ultimate acrylic prosthesis was made. He painted the iris, a pale sea-green with flecks of brown and yellow. As a last step, he touched up the white part – he uses a length of thread to paint in the delicate veins. In the meantime, Mrs. Evans went off to a nearby sandwich shop for lunch.
Now she is back to be fitted with her new eye.
After a few minor trims and adjustments, the ocularist slips in the new eye. He asks her to glance left, then right. The new eye tracks perfectly.
Then he hands her the mirror and she appraises the result. “It sure looks better,” she says.
A funny thing happened during lunch, she says. When she went to the sandwich shop, she forgot to wear her dark glasses. Without an eye, she was no longer just another human being having lunch, but a curiosity, a spectacle.
“People just look and look,” she says. “I kept thinking, what are they looking at me for?
“And then – oh, oh – I remembered.”
Now she can go anywhere and not one in a hundred will guess her secret.
“We’re in the business of the ultimate camouflage,” says Mr. Trawnik. “I want to make sure that after I do my work, no one knows I was there.”
The Eye Guy
Randy Trawnik brings new meaning to the phrase trompe l’oeil
by Stacey Yervasi – D Magazine June 2004
Randy Trawnik sits in his Preston Center office, beaming like a proud father as he leafs through albums containing before-and-after photos of his patients, many of whom are children. But Trawnik is not a doctor; he’s an artist. He makes fake eyes—or, more properly, ocular prostheses. And if the images in the albums aren’t vivid enough, Trawnik can pop out his own left eye for closer inspection.
When he was 17, Trawnik was shot in the face with a blank during an ROTC training exercise. The injury required the removal of his eye, and it ended his military career. But it also introduced Trawnik to the little-known field of ocularistry. After receiving a degree in art, he began a five-year apprenticeship under John O’Donnell, the pioneering Dallas ocularist who had treated him.
Trawnik is now considered one of the best ocularists in the country. His creations, custom-made to match the patient’s remaining eye, have even fooled ophthalmologists. Each prosthetic piece begins as a plain acrylic orb cast from a wax model designed to fit perfectly in the patient’s eye socket. Layers of translucent paint give the iris a 3-D look. Trawnik uses red thread to produce the wispy blood vessels. “I consider myself the ultimate stealth artist,” he says, alluding to the realism of his prosthetics, allowing his patients to wear them in anonymity. The only easily discernable difference: the pupils can’t dilate.
Trawnik’s reputation attracts people from around the world, from Saudi Arabian princes to American beauty queens. “I am a big fish in a small pond,” he says. His skill and an empathy capable only of a wounded healer are their reward. As if to highlight the bond he shares with his patients, Trawnik introduces me to one, an older gentleman in for a follow-up appointment. The man proudly rolls and crosses his eyes, then asks if I can tell which is artificial. I assure him that I cannot. He and Trawnik exchange knowing winks, content to leave me in ignorance.
