Growing up Catholic, I was raised to believe in miracles. As I grew older, the notion of something miraculous happening seemed dumb or just a ploy to keep hoping something impossible would happen, like developing a cure for cancer or AIDS or world peace or seeing The New York Mets win the World Series. My faith in such fantastical phenomena kept fading and fading until I turned 13 and was a witness to my own miracle.

It was recess at my over priced, overly oppressive and just plain annoying Catholic middle school. We were allowed outside because it was mid April and spring was in full speed. We did as all 12 and 13-year-olds did, be completely and utterly stupid. I don’t know whose bright idea it was to start throwing a pen as if it was a baseball; all I knew was that it was bad news and I didn’t want to be a part of it and then, knowing my luck, I became the one who ended the game. The blue ballpoint pen punctured my iris. I screamed so thunderously loud that even the deaf could hear me. Then the playground went silent like an old western film. You could hear the wind rustling in the trees and making plastic bags dance around.

I took my hands off of my eye and I opened it, and all I could see was brown and shadows of people in front of me. I felt sick to my stomach. I started yelling, “I can’t see! I need to go to the nurse because I can’t see!” The nurse sent me home and my mom sent me to the eye doctor who then sent me to the hospital for immediate emergency surgery. At this time in my life I have never even broken a bone let alone needed a surgical procedure done on me, but if I wanted to see out of that eye ever again even if its impaired vision, I needed this procedure because every second that went by, the brown color of my eye was leaking out of the wound.

At that very moment I felt like a cartoon, because I never in my whole life would have thought that my eye could leak. So I was rushed to the New York Eye and Ear Hospital in Manhattan where my eye doctor called in to get me in for surgery. Right when I stepped through the doors I was rushed into a hospital room to change into a hospital robe and then sent to get a MRI. Then, I was rushed into an operating room. I was beyond scared. I felt numb up until I got the long needle for the IV stuck into my hand. They then put me to sleep and the procedure lasted for three whole hours.

I woke up to a hospital room full of family. I had bandages covering half of my face and I didn’t even notice because of how high I was off the painkillers I was given via IV. I had to stay the night for observation and they had to run tests on me in the morning. I woke up and was immediately sent to an examination room where the surgeon took my bandages off and tested my eyesight. I had regained almost complete sight in my eye. The surgeon was astonished because he was only testing me to see how strong my glasses needed to be, but I left the hospital with out needing glasses and within a month I had regained perfect 20/20 vision in my eyes.

To this day the doctors are in awe about how beautifully I have recovered and I was called “the miracle boy” for a while. They were right, it was indeed miraculous phenomena, because a trained surgeon and optometrist have no clue as to how I can see let alone see perfectly out of that eye. They had never seen a case like that in their entire careers. Ironically I felt as through I was visually impaired before the surgery and that this was fated to happen so that I may see that there is something beyond our human understanding, something that we cannot control and that scares us, but it is out there. It is impossible to contemplate infinity with a finite mind and even though some people hate hearing that it is true and we don’t need an explanation to everything out there in the universe or on the possible ethereal plain. Sometimes we should just call it a miracle and be grateful that something ended so extraordinarily.