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.”
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