People take so many different things for granted.
We really don’t stop and think that so many of the things that we think are going to be there for our entire lives could be gone in the blink of an eye.
Something as simple as being able to see is one of them. We go through life not realizing that without any warning whatsoever that all could be gone.
Sometimes it is the result of a horrible illness and sometimes its the result of some freak accident that could have been avoided if someone had not been careless.
Guns are definitely nothing to mess with and aren’t toys. If you wouldn’t throw a hammer at someone’s face you shouldn’t aim a gun at someone just to joke around.
Too many people don’t bother to think about the permanent consequences of something they are doing as a joke.
It was a miracle that she survived the horrifying ordeal which unfolded on that fateful night, and it is a testament to the advancements in modern medicine that she now looks so different after getting a new face years later.
“It’s spring break,” Chrissy Steltz recalled of the night in March of 1999 when she would ultimately lose half of her face. “We’re all, you know, doing what teenagers shouldn’t be, you know, drinking. And I went into the back room and offered them orange juice, and I saw one of my friends with the shotgun.”
Steltz was rushed to the hospital, where doctors found that three-quarters of her face had been destroyed by the blast. Though the medical staff was able to save her life, they were not able to save her nose and eyes. “The blast itself removed the contents of her left eye socket, removed her nose and the supporting mid-facial structures and damaged her right eye to the extent that she lost vision,” explained Dr. Eric Dierks.
“When I finally knew what had happened to me and that I had lost my sight and that it would never be coming back,” said Steltz, “I knew I could sit back and have a pity party, or I could figure out what to do and go about doing it, and that’s exactly what I did.” She would spend the next eleven years wearing a sleep mask at all times until doctors were finally able to make a prosthetic face for her.
“When anybody finds out how I went blind, their first comment 99 percent of the time is, ‘I’m sorry.’ And my response to that is, ‘I’m not. I lived,’” said Steltz. “There’s nothing to be sorry about living through something like that. Don’t be sorry for me. Be happy for me. Be proud of the fact that I have gone on with my life.”