Traci Medford-Rosow - Unblinded: One Mans Courageous Journey Through Darkness to Sight

Advance praise for Unblinded

Unblinded is a once-in-a-lifetime story, a journey through darkness and light, love and loss, awakening and discovery. Its pages take us, at once, on a remarkable true adventure and into the heart and mind of a most extraordinary individual. A beautifully written and inspiring tale, and a reminder to us all about what really matters.

ROBERT KURSON, New York Times bestselling author of Crashing Through, Shadow Divers, Pirate Hunters and Rocket Men

Unblinded tells a remarkable story of sudden blindness, new vision, and sight regained. It offers great insight into the nature of realitythat which we perceive and that which we create for ourselves.

ISAAC LIDSKY, New York Times bestselling author of Eyes Wide Open

Unblinded provides honest, profound insight into the emotional trauma that occurs when vision is lost and the path forward in life cannot be seen.

LISSA POINCENOT, National Lebers Hereditary Optic Neuropathy Advocate

Miracles can happen from the inside out. In Unblinded, Traci Medford-Rosow leads us through the wondrous story of one mans experience of overcoming blindness. Unblinded takes the reader on a fascinating, behind-the-scenes tour of what went on during those years of darkness and how Kevin Coughlin, after battling alcoholism, loneliness, prejudice, and perhaps most of all himself, emerges as a man of wisdom and sight.

ANN CAMPANELLA, Award-winning and bestselling author of Motherhood: Lost and Found

Unblinded: A tale about overcoming personal tragedy risks sentimentality. Unblinded offers instead a sightless perspective on reality that could engage a physicist.

PROF. NEIL J. SULLIVAN, Author: The Prometheus Bomb and The Dodgers Move West

In Unblinded, you will see how what we say and the way we think does become our reality. What an eye opener reading Unblinded was for me. The struggles with alcoholism, life, and being blind caused Kevin to make a mental as well as physical paradigm shift into willing his life back to wellness. Kevin begins to realize that as he muddles through this battle, he is a living, walking miracle.

Unblinded

Unblinded

One Mans Courageous Journey through Darkness to Sight

Traci Medford-Rosow and Kevin Coughlin

NEW YORK

LONDON NASHVILLE MELBOURNE VANCOUVER

Unblinded

One Mans Courageous Journey Through Darkness to Sight

2018 Traci Medford-Rosow and Kevin Coughlin

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in New York, New York, by Morgan James Publishing. Morgan James is a trademark of Morgan James, LLC. www.MorganJamesPublishing.com

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The information in this book is not intended to diagnose or treat any medical condition nor to serve as a substitute for informed medical advice or care. All events are true. Some of the names of the people and organizations have been changed to protect their privacy.

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ISBN 9781683507826 paperback

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017915232

Cover and Interior Design by:

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Kevin Coughlin wakes up one morning in 1997 and cannot read the newspaper. Even the bold headlines are fuzzy. Kevin has no idea that he is carrying a rare genetic disorder: Lebers Hereditary Optic Neuropathy.

Within five days he is blind.

The tragedy of his sudden blindness is exacerbated by the fact that Kevin is a serious amateur photographer and lover of the visual arts. Every aspect of his life is plunged into unbearable darkness.

Kevins loss of sight initiates an exploration of his internal world. After decades of heavy drinking, he embarks on the long and difficult road to sobriety. He discovers the powerful effect of his thoughts and spoken words. He chooses to focus on gratitude for what he has rather than on anger at what he has lost.

In a world of darkness, he sees how to be kinder to himself and others. He becomes an activist for the blind as only a person who once had eyesight could and is instrumental in establishing New York Citys first blind advocacy program.

Fifteen years later, Kevin catches what seems to be a glimpse of light in his bathroom mirror. Kevins is the only documented case in the world of a non-medically assisted regeneration of the optic nerve.

Over the next three years, Kevin chronicles the daily progressthe euphoria and the agonizing setbacks. It is from those journal entries and deeply moving conversations with Kevin that author Traci Medford-Rosow has shaped Kevins remarkable story.

Unblinded is a story of miracles within miracles that will leave the reader wondering what lies behind the reality we think we see.

Authors Note to Readers:

This is a true story of one mans remarkable battle to regain his eyesight after suddenly losing it to a rare genetic disorder. All events are true, however, the names of some of the people and organizations have been changed to protect their privacy.

I first learned of Kevin Coughlin on Easter morning 2016. My husband returned from walking our two dogs, breathless with excitementa blind man in our New York City neighborhood had miraculously regained his sight!

Kevin was looking for someone to write his story, and I agreed to do it. Kevin kept a journal chronicling the return of his vision. A selected entry appears after each chapter. However, the entire unedited journal can be found in the appendix.

As our weekly work progressed, it soon became clear that I was witnessing a man who had become unblind not only in his vision, but in his soul, as well.

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank Kevin Coughlin for trusting me to write his amazing story, and in so doing, hopefully sharing it with many others. A special thanks to my husband, Joel Rosow, for his patience in helping us shape the story and in his tireless review of numerous drafts. To my developmental editor, Richard Kelley, who always knows what the story is even before I know it myself, you are indeed my Max Perkins, Editor-of-Genius. To Sarah Saffian, my teacher at the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, author of