Seeing is believing for Bartley teen

Julia Holdcroft holds her car while looking out the window at home. Over the weekend, she received electronic “eSight” glasses that have brought a blurry world finally into focus.

Lorri Sughroue/McCook Gazette

BARTLEY, Neb. — The first thing Julia Holdcroft, 14, has been doing each morning when she wakes up is look out her window, “just to see what’s going on outside.”

It’s something she never used to do.That’s because a whole new world opened up for Julia when she received electronic “eSight” glasses this past Saturday.

Thanks to the generosity of donors, enough funds were raised to purchase the high-tech glasses that arrived in the mail on Friday.

“It shocked and encouraged me by the generosity of regular people who donated,” said her mom, Robin, on the $10,000 raised. The glasses were not covered by insurance and a go-fund-me site and a bank account were set up for donations to purchase the glasses. Along with regular donations, there were a lot of anonymous donations, Robin said.

Since getting the glasses, Julia has been navigating her surroundings slowly, on her own, with her first training with the e-Sight manufacturer on Monday by Skype.

Born with optic nerve hypoplasia, when the optic nerves are not fully developed and can’t transmit information from her eyes to her brain, Julia has been legally blind since birth and can see items only if they’re less than one inch from her eyes.

Otherwise, all she sees are indistinct shapes. The glasses have a built-in high-definition camera that feeds information into a computer, that processes everything into a video and displays it in real time onto screens near the eyes.

Since wearing the glasses, some things have really popped into focus for her, Julia said. Now, she can see people’s eye color, Julia said, along with details that before were just blurry objects, like pictures on the wall. “I didn’t realize how much she didn’t see,” her mom said.

She’ll still have to use her cane while walking with them until she learns how to orientate herself with the glasses.

And she won’t be able to wear them for track, as they are too expensive to fix if they happen to fall off and break.

But Julia is thrilled to finally see what she’s been missing all these years, and for all of the people who donated so she could get the glasses.

“People are wonderful,” she said.

The original story on Julia can be seen here.