He is 50 years old and has been living with a glass eye for 49 years.
Happily.
“Life doesn’t always have two sides,” he says, but he doesn’t feel disadvantaged because of it.
The Children’s Eye Cancer Foundation would like to thank a man who was diagnosed with retinoblastoma at the age of one for a very personal, wonderful account of life with a glass eye.
“Today, at the age of 46, I look back with a smile on my life, which I have lived with only one functioning eye.
My aunt discovered a spot in my iris by chance 45 years ago and, thanks to the right doctor, I was quickly admitted to Essen Hospital.
There I was diagnosed with a fast-growing retinoblastoma, which was developing in both directions, i.e. also in the direction of the optic nerve.
My left eye was removed within a day and from then on I lived with a glass eye.

I first became aware of this disability when I was five years old from a photo.
I looked at it from bottom to top and noticed the unequal position of the eyes.
My mother explained the situation to me as best she could and I was happy with it, without actually being able to understand it properly.
My eyes moved differently to other children, I was aware of this, but as my glass eye also moved a little due to the remaining muscles, nobody really noticed and the “silver eye” was accepted.

That was probably the best thing that could have happened to me, because I never felt disadvantaged or even handicapped back then.
Especially in sport, I tried everything during my school years, the more dangerous the better.
For me, it was always about the certificate of honor and success.
I was particularly fond of ball sports.
I played tennis and handball with great interest from the age of seven and never had the feeling that I couldn’t hit or catch a ball.

My teammates were never aware of my disability and I was integrated into the team with all rights and duties.
There were never any extra sausages – why should there have been?

I had unconsciously learned to compensate for my lack of three-dimensional vision.
My brain compensates for this in a way that still fascinates me today.
Technically, I should see the world in front of me like a photograph, but that’s not the case.
I even enjoy watching 3D movies, but I only need these silly glasses to remove the shadows of the movie.

However, at a dinner my parents gave for friends, I had to learn the limits of my “physics”. We children were assigned to serve and I was supposed to pour more wine. As an eight-year-old, I felt a little uncomfortable with the task, but I didn’t let on and diligently poured more wine. However, it came as it had to and of course I spilled the wine on a lady because I couldn’t pour the glass with the experience I had today. The chain reaction that followed, the glass falling over etc., made me leave the room ashamed. I never wanted anything like that again. Nowadays, I either use the shadows of the glass and bottle to “hit” or, contrary to etiquette, I rest the neck of the bottle briefly on the glass. Most people don’t even notice.

When I was 13, I went to boarding school due to my parents’ separation.
From then on, the world of sport really opened up to me and I also developed a certain manual skill.
However, volleyball, field hockey, squash and skiing became my favorite sports.
I was an average student, not really good but not really bad either.
But I excelled at sport and, ambitious as I was – and still am – I always tried to be the best.
I learned by intuition and by copying the better ones, which helped me to become the school champion in various disciplines.
At the same time, my extremely sharp eyesight helped me with difficult work such as model making or other things.

During puberty, the opposite sex also became increasingly important to me.
At first I repressed it or compensated for it with sport, but at the age of 15, my first girlfriend brought an obvious interest.
But something changed.
I began to feel ashamed of my missing eye.
I found myself trying to stare straight ahead during conversations or turning my head instead of my eyes.
The typical questions of “why me” started to come up inside me.
I was recognized in the community, but somehow I was also a loner.
Was it me or my glass eye?
I ignored the odd comment with feigned aplomb, but somehow the situation annoyed me.
My girlfriend at the time never said a word about it.

In addition to sport, which was still the most interesting part of boarding school for me, I was increasingly given responsibility for younger pupils.
This involved tutoring on the boarding school wing, but also responsibility in so-called services.
As I had also started surfing at the same time and thus refreshed my sailing skills from my early childhood, I was quickly entrusted with the nautical service.
I really enjoyed training and leading this group.
I loved the water, and on the one hand I enjoyed the development of my fellow students while sailing – but on the other hand I also noticed a certain satisfaction in the leadership demands that the service inevitably entailed.
Within a short period of time, I passed all kinds of sailing licenses, from the A license to the sport boat license and BR license.
Unfortunately, my “disability” caught up with me a little here, as I was not allowed to pull water skiers.
There are worse things and besides, I much prefer to hang on the back and slash the waves…

After a year abroad in Canada, I actively started gymnastics in the twelfth grade.
We were a close-knit group of boys, all more or less talented, but with great enthusiasm and a grinder for a teacher.
He had the ability to push me “to the limit” and train me.
As I had a strong ambition to be better than the others anyway, possibly due to my one-eyed nature, he pushed me to really perform at my best.
This affected both my physical abilities and my mental strength at the time.
On the physical side, coordination was not a component of vision for me, but of body control, and so I went through the exercises on parallel bars, high bar, rings and floor without mercy.

Alongside gymnastics, squash was one of my favorite sports.
It allowed me to completely exhaust myself in a short space of time and also mentally test my opponent.
I loved these situations.
I compensated for the lack of visual angles by turning my head quickly.
Of course, this was playing with fire as I wasn’t wearing eye protection.
I was aware of the risk but, as so often, ambition got the better of me.
I remained faithful to this sport throughout my studies and only withdrew from it when I noticed signs of wear and tear in my back.
Since then, my “old” favorite sports from childhood – skiing in winter, windsurfing and sailing in summer – as well as sufficient fitness training have kept me going.
When skiing in particular, I’ve noticed that I’m relying more and more on my hearing as well as my sight and that I mainly look for the left edge of the slope if I can’t be found somewhere between the trees in the deep snow.
Snowboarding became a particular challenge as I can’t avoid a certain blind spot.
As I didn’t want to do without it, I skied as anti-cyclically as possible in order to have clear slopes and enjoy carving.

Of course, I was also a car fan when I was young.
I drove a moped from the age of sixteen and passed my driving test at school without any complaints.
Estimating distances is no problem at all for me and thanks to my good reaction time, I have been driving accident-free to this day.
My tendency to speed was gradually taken away from me by “Flensburg” and today I think I am a reasonably defensive driver (my wife probably thinks differently…).
I look over my shoulder a little more than other drivers and I notice that I use all my mirrors more often.
Overall, however, I “somehow” compensate for my lack of spatial vision and the only time I feel uncomfortable in the car is in heavy snowfall or rain.

The “hothouse” boarding school ended with an excellent sports Abitur and another “satisfactory” in the Abitur.
So my priorities were clear.
After several internships, I went on to study at university in Munich.
At the beginning, my studies were not very well balanced between serious studying and sustained partying and I kept tipping over to the partying side.
Together with my best friend, who is still my best friend today, we moved into a legendary apartment and enjoyed student life to the full.
Gradually, however, I began to understand the “seriousness of life”: I didn’t stop partying or doing sports, but gradually I became a little more aware of the seriousness of life.
We still went on surfing trips and did sports, but everything was a little more focused on succeeding at university.
My girlfriend gradually became my constant companion and pushed me in the right direction.
She gave me support and self-confidence and tried to stop me from doing anything too stupid.
She accepted me as I was, with all my faults, and showed me a certain care for my eyesight.
My visits to the ophthalmologist and to Augen Müller&Söhne in Wiesbaden became a little more regular than before.
She has been my wife and the mother of my two sons for almost 24 years now.
Both children were examined extremely frequently for retinoblastoma at Essen University Hospital, as we didn’t want to take any risks.
Of course, this involved considerable effort, as babies don’t like flying from Munich to Düsseldorf on an empty stomach, let alone keeping still for the whole morning.
Like me at the time, they were examined under general anesthesia.
They were and are free of any findings.
Hopefully nothing will change now that they are sixteen and twenty years old.
In any case, the screening has been completed years ago.
My tumor still physically exists – but it was fixed in formalin, so the genetic examination could not rule out heredity with certainty.

After my honors degree, I was drawn to a large consultancy and, thanks to my qualifications on both the technical and business side, logistics became my area of expertise.
Once again, my ambition was the driving force and within eight years I went from a small consultant to Vice President.
The high level of mobility and, above all, the frequent flying and the associated bad air irritate my eyes immensely.
I have almost chronic conjunctivitis and eye drops are a constant companion.
As I’m not overly careful about cleaning my glass eye, practically never take it out and a quick rub with the palm of my hand replaces the antiseptic, lint-free cloth, I have to live with a certain amount of irritation.
My vanity notices the minimal drooping of the lid over the eye when I get tired.
This occurred and still occurs mainly in the evening and is due to the lack of tear film, which I combat with artificial tears from time to time.
In addition, I am not getting any younger and have only recently bought the first pair of glasses of my life for the coming age-related presbyopia (apart from about 100 pairs of sunglasses, which I love in every shape and form…).

Today, at the age of 50, I look back on my life with a smile and thank God, my aunt and the doctors for giving me my sight, because I love life.
Disadvantaged?
I don’t think so!”

Sebastian
Encourager