Summary
Bostonians aren’t always known for their friendly, helpful nature, but Blair Wong has discovered a very different side to the city’s inhabitants.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In high school, back in the 70s, Blair Wong remembers he usually had trouble |
| 0:07.0 | staying awake during physics class, but one day was different, the day he learned |
| 0:11.8 | how light passes through a lens. Blair became |
| 0:14.9 | obsessed with understanding how a transparent curve could focus light. |
| 0:18.7 | I didn't really care for the other chapters in my physics textbook in high school, but I read the optics chapter probably |
| 0:27.0 | about 20 times. |
| 0:28.6 | And the lens he loved most was the human eye. |
| 0:31.3 | Romanticly, it's the window to the soul. |
| 0:34.0 | Blair's passion never went away. |
| 0:36.4 | He got his degree in opticianry, and by his early 20s he was a practicing optician, his dream |
| 0:41.8 | job. |
| 0:42.8 | It was around this time, though, that something unsettled him. |
| 0:45.8 | My friends and I were going to see a movie, |
| 0:49.4 | and my friends, boom, went right to a row of seats. And I had no idea where they went. One of my |
| 0:58.1 | friends came back to get me and said, you can't see it here? With his optical training, Blair sent something off. |
| 1:06.0 | He took through all the possible reasons for his difficulty seeing in the dark. |
| 1:10.0 | And then he remembered that his brother Bruce had mentioned something similar. |
| 1:14.0 | Blair knew they should see a specialist. |
| 1:17.0 | He remember sitting on the floor outside the doctor's office, |
| 1:20.0 | waiting for news, and then they got their diagnosis. |
| 1:23.9 | Retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative disease that slowly robs you of your eyesight. |
| 1:30.0 | Blair and his brother's vision would cloud over and narrow more and more each year until they were completely blind. |
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