Richie’s new look a sight for sore eyes

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

For the first time this spring, Kelly McEvoy Lopez got to look into the eyes of her 20-month-old son.

What she saw staring back, aside from his sky-tinged baby blues, was a fresh start for a little boy whose entry into the world on Oct. 16, 2014, was marked by panic and fear.

Of course, there’s still a little fear — fear that, like any other normal toddler, Richie Lopez could pop his eyes out and stick one in his mouth.

Richie was born without eyes.

These past 20 months, Kelly Lopez, a Jefferson native, has learned to triumph over the unthinkable — by some estimates, Richie’s condition affects only one in every 5 million to 10 million babies.

“It was a lot to digest in the beginning,” Lopez confessed recently by phone from suburban Phoenix, where she works in human resources. “But there’s no sense in not moving on. There’s nothing we can do about it, and we want him to lead a normal life.

“For him to do that, it’s got to become our norm.”

Lopez, who still considers Jefferson home even though she relocated with her mom to Arizona following the sudden death of family patriarch Richard McEvoy in 1988, first spoke to The Jefferson Herald in 2015, after media outlets internationally picked up the story about her son’s rare birth defect.

Going public had been her way of finding someone, anyone, with knowledge of what she now knows as anophthalmia — the absence of one or both eyes.

In the beginning, she resorted to Googling, “Baby born without eyes.”

Nearly two years into his life, Richie is part of a genetic research study and now flaunts a pair of the most striking blue eyes since Sinatra.

“They’re so real. You forget they’re not real,” Lopez said of her son’s new prosthetic eyes.

The bright blue, she said, matches his big sister’s eyes.

In reality, should anybody ever ask where he gets his beautiful blue eyes, the answer might be surprising — his ocularist.

Richie was fitted with his custom-fabricated ocular prosthetics in April.

“It was very emotional,” Lopez said. “To finally be here, it was exciting and emotional at the same time.”

While Richie is still blind, the artificial eyes lessen the shock of having none at all.

“It’s amazing to be able to go out into public,” Lopez said.

“He’s getting to that point where he rips the sunglasses off,” she added. “At least it’s not pure panic anymore.”

In November, Lopez and husband Javier, a veteran of Desert Storm, will celebrate 20 years of marriage.

Some friends have distanced themselves in the 20 months since Richie was born.

“We’ve had people we don’t talk to as much,” Kelly Lopez said. “They don’t know what to say to us. They think we’re still grieving.”

“I’m trying to be understanding of it,” she added, noting she’s not sure she’d know what to say if the situation was reversed.

Their two other children — perfectly normal girls ages 14 and 6 — offered no indication whatsoever of Richie’s condition.

Getting to pick out Richie’s eye color this spring was admittedly “not something you think about much,” Lopez said.

“It was kind of a lot of pressure,” she said.

Along those lines, ocularistry is one of those professions you don’t think about much, either, if at all.

No schools teach ocularistry.

Instead, budding ocularists have to seek out apprenticeships, where they learn how to make, paint and fit artificial eyes.

Gone are the glass eyes introduced in the 16th century, replaced by eyes of acrylic plastic.

“He popped ’em in one Friday afternoon,” Lopez said. “I was shocked how well it went.”

Lopez admits she had a lot of anxiety in the days leading up to the procedure in Phoenix.

She worried that Richie’s new eyes would produce a dead stare, like that of a creepy, antique doll.

That’s not the case.

“It’s amazing,” she said of being able to look into her son’s eyes.

She has Lions Clubs International — whose sight programs are legendary — to thank for them.

Lopez in 2015 reached out to the local Mesa East Lions Club in Arizona to see if they could assist in getting her and Richie to the International Children’s Anophthalmia Network (ICAN) conference in Philadelphia.

There, Richie could be genetically tested and take part in a research study to shed light on the condition.

Not even ICAN knows the exact incidence of anophthalmia.

Members of the Lions Club first had to visit the Lopez home in person to make sure Richie really didn’t have eyes.

But once they saw for themselves, the club committed to raising $500 for the trip to Philadelphia.

To date, Lopez said, the Lions have raised more than $18,000 to be used for Richie’s medical care.

He’ll have to be fitted with new prosthetics every three to five years, she said, as he grows.

In the surest of signs that they’ve settled into a new kind of normal, Javier Lopez joked that Richie should get purple eyes.

Mom swiftly vetoed that.

But ol’ blue eyes doesn’t necessarily have to stay blue, either.

“Maybe,” she said, “we’ll go with green next time.”