Chuck Bamata: The true story

By the time Chuck Bamata had reached two, his parents had noticed that he was cross-eyed in one eye. With no consideration for the expense, Chuck’s father and mother took him to a local Cleveland Ophthalmologist dozens of times, and had him in his first pair of glasses by age three.

Determined to correct the problem, Mr. B found out about a new surgical procedure that could correct the problem permanently. It would require a trip to Chicago to visit a specialist, who would then determine if the procedure would be suitable for Chuck’s condition.

In 1959, at age six, Chuck was admitted to Deaconess Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, to have a muscle shortened in one eye, in an attempt to correct the position of his pupil. He was anesthetized with ether on a handful of cotton, and it was the first time in his life he ever experienced life fading away in a spiraling world of wee-wee-wah-wahs.

Follow up:

When the surgery was complete, and he regained consciousness, he promptly puked from the ether, and awoke into a world of echoing darkness. He remembers being blind for those first two or three days in the hospital, and above all he remembers the soothing voice of his mother. Voices came and went, his father, his sister, his brothers, his doctors, and his nurses, even his young hospital mates, but the one constant in that frightening world of pain and darkness was his mother’s voice.

Chuck isn’t sure how many days he spent there in blindness, but he says it felt like forever. When the day finally came that his mother said the doctor would come to remove the bandages, he thought he could hear something funny in his mother’s voice. This was a new procedure, and there were no guarantees. Chuck doesn’t know what the odds of success had been, but there must have been a certain amount of risk because he's certain that what he had heard in his mother's voice was apprehension and fear.

When the bandages were removed, the light was so bright, it caused intense pain, and Chuck cried every time he opened or moved his eyes. He was given a pair of dark glasses to help transition his sensitive eyes to the world of light and color. When he looked in the mirror, Chuck was amazed to see that one eye was white and one eye was blood red.

Back home, still sporting shades full time, Chuck remembers a Saturday Night penny poker night with his father and brothers and sister. Chuck’s father loved to play poker, and had taught them how to play at a young age. Through poker they had learned the lessons of winning and losing in a friendly game of penny-ante, and where being a bad loser was not tolerated. That particular night, Chuck was having a streak of bad luck, and no matter what cards he got, good or bad, he couldn’t win, and he started whining about it. Chuck noticed a lot of snickering going on, and finally his brothers and sister could hold back their laughter no longer, as they mockingly confessed that they could see his cards reflected in his dark glasses.

The moral of the story? Even though you may see the pros on television, looking cool, and hiding the "tells" in their eyes by playing poker with shades on, you’ll notice, they never ever hold their cards up in front of their face and thus avoid the killer "mirror effect". Chuck learned his lesson the hard way and it cost him a roll of pennies in the process.