It’s being called a miracle.
A Florida woman who was blind for more than two decades is seeing again after an unrelated surgery returned her sight – a result doctors can’t explain.
“I always knew in my heart that God was going to let me have my eyesight back,” Mary Ann Powell-Franco told NBC2. “I knew it.”
Powell-Franco, who was colour-blind since birth, completely lost her ability to see in 1993 after a violent car accident left her with ruptured discs in her back.
While undergoing surgery to repair the injuries, she experienced another serious setback.
“He said, ‘Mary Ann, you had a stroke on that table,’” she remembered a surgeon telling her.
That’s when her world went dark.
“Nothing,” she said. “I couldn’t see anything.”
Despite the reversal of fortune, Powell-Franco refused to let it slow her down.
“You can’t see, so what,” she remembered telling herself. “Get up, get moving and I did.”
Over the next two decades she lived life the only way she knew how. She took up art, learned to draw and paint, and even jumped from a plane during a skydiving adventure.
But it was a fall in her home that would change her life all over again.
After re-injuring her spine, Powell-Franco found herself back on the operating table.
No one expected she would wake up to an even bigger surprise than the one she experienced 23 years earlier – not even her doctor.
“She’s my miracle patient,” Dr. John Afshar said. “She basically amazed me.”
When she awoke from the anesthesia, Powell-Franco was shocked.
“I said, ‘Doctor, guess what? I can see,’” she exclaimed. “Yes, I can see now!”
Not only did it allow her to see objects clearly, it also corrected her colour-blindness.
“She was on cloud nine,” Afshar said. “If you could float, she would float.”
The procedure Afshar performed had nothing to do with Powell-Franco’s eyes, but instead aimed to straighten her spine.
“There’s really no explanation,” Afshar said.
He did offer one theory though.
He believes the blood could have restored previously dormant nerve cells that enable vision.
Now able to see, Powell-Franco is re-applying for her driver’s license.
“I feel like I’m in my 20s you know,” she said sitting in her niece’s car. “I’m ready to go.”
Next up, she’s planning a trip to Michigan to visit friends and family, and to finally get a look at grandchildren she’s never seen before.