Seeing Double

A mother and son’s health issues are unexpectedly intertwined

- Luc Rinaldi

KIMBERLY MACURDY HAS always had trouble seeing things. She started wearing glasses as a young child, and her prescription became progressively stronger as she grew up. Over the last few decades, the 57-year-old mother of three performed so poorly on eye exams that optometrists, in disbelief, would ask her to cut it out and start paying attention.

In 2008, a sudden worsening of her eyesight caused Macurdy to suspect it was more than run-of-the-mill vision loss. One day, sitting in the kitchen of her home just north of Houston, Texas, Macurdy couldn’t read the time on her microwave from across the room, even with her glasses on. At her job as a purchasing manager for a manufacturing company, she gradually had trouble focusing on spreadsheets that were right in front of her.

Macurdy’s optometrist couldn’t figure out what was causing her symptoms, nor could a series of experts— including an ophthalmologist, a retina specialist and an optics specialist— who examined her over the following year. A few doctors decided the likeliest explanation was that she was stressed and imagining her symptoms, given her familial situation: around the same time, the youngest of her three children, seven-year-old Braden, went to the emergency room three times for vomiting, fever and life-threatening dehydration. She was stressed, but she insisted she wasn’t making things up and kept pursuing fresh opinions.

In 2009, Macurdy saw Dr. Andrew Lee, the head of ophthalmology at Houston Methodist Hospital’s Blanton Eye Institute. One evening shortly before her appointment, as she was making her way to bed, she had a seizure, dropping to the ground and shaking uncontrollably. She somehow got up into her bed, where she later awoke in a puddle of her own urine.