(Helayne Seidman (top photo))
A former patient e-mailed Dr. Eric Mandel, unsure if the Upper East Side eye surgeon remembered treating her two decades earlier.
Mandel said he could never forget Elvi Amodio and her bravery.
“She didn’t realize the impression she made on me,” Mandel said last week.
Mandel and Amodio reunited in his East 70th Street office last week, seeing each other for the first time since 1988, when the shy little girl from Italy came to New York hoping for a miracle.
“I wanted to personally thank him for what he did for me,” said Amodio, now 32. “He saved my eye.”
In 1988, Elvi was writing on the blackboard in her Sicilian classroom as two classmates fought. One threw a pencil across the room at the other, piercing little Elvi, then 7, in the right eye.
Elvi’s teacher rushed her to a local hospital, where doctors were at a loss after a few operations to repair the torn cornea. Elvi still could not see out of the damaged eye. Doctors talked of removing it.
Elvi’s mother contacted her sister, then living in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, for help. The sister did some research and found Mandel. The doctor now specializes in laser eye surgery but was trained in cornea microsurgery and reconstructing eyes damaged by trauma.
But first Elvi had to get to New York. A collection was taken up so she could travel here with her mother and an uncle. “My first flight,” Elvi remembered.
When Mandel examined the curly-haired youngster in January 1988, he found the pencil had penetrated a half-inch deep, going through the white part of the eye and destroying her blue iris. It went deep enough to damage the lens.
“What we were lucky about, thank God, is that it didn’t affect the retina,” he said. “That gave us hope.”
Still, Mandel said he didn’t know how the eye would respond to surgery. There was a chance it would simply fall apart.
Mandel removed the lens and stitched Elvi’s eye back together using sutures one-tenth the width of human hair.
When Elvi took off her protective eye patch a few days later, she could distinguish shapes. The little girl remained in New York with her aunt and uncle as she recovered and her vision began to gradually improve.
When her eye healed, she was able to wear a contact lens and her vision returned.
Nine months after the sight-saving operation, Elvi returned to Italy. She now spoke English and felt braver.
“I could have a normal life, like every child,” she said.
Elvi married four years ago and works at an insurance company in Bologna. She was thrilled last year when Mandel responded to her e-mail.
Mandel treated Elvi, her husband and a cousin to lunch after last week’s reunion. But first, Elvi had a few gifts for the doctor.
She gave him a photo of the Sicilian coastline that she visits every year.
“Knowing that you can see this,” Mandel told her, “means everything.”