Young Calgary Flames Fan Experiences Her Favorite Team Play with Help of Special Electronic Glasses

Olivia Lettich, an 11-year-old, legally blind, Calgary Flames fan, was provided with the opportunity to watch her favorite team on Sunday with the help of a pair of specialized electronic glasses.

eSight, an Ontario based company founded in 2006, created a device like a pair of glasses, that uses a high-speed, high-definition camera which captures the images a legally blind individual is looking at onto two OLED screens in front of the user’s eyes. 

Lettich became legally blind at the age of two, after undergoing nine rounds of chemotherapy and 50 rounds of radiation treatments in her fight with bilateral retinoblastoma, a rare form of eye cancer that mostly affects children. She was diagnosed with the disease at the age of four months. 

While she has attended games at the ScotiaBank Saddledome, Sunday’s game against the New York Islanders provided her with a whole new outlook. Her mother, Meredith, told Metronews Calgary, “She [Olivia] got a little teary when she first put them on, and she said ‘Everything is so beautiful.’” She added, “It is the little things, the details that come out because of the glasses, that she is now able to experience.” 

During the pregame warmups, she was invited to sit on the bench to watch the skate around and after the game she got to meet, Johnny Gaudreau, Sean Monahan and Mark Giordano, three of her favorite Flames players. 

Prior to getting the chance to watch her favorite team defeat the Islanders, Olivia told Metronews, “I am most excited for meeting the players. I am going to be thinking about how cool it is that I can see them.”

She added, “They [the glasses] help me see so much better. I can read and I can watch things from far away. I have a lot of trouble reading because the print is so small to me. With these, I can zoom in enough that can read and watch movies.”