The face is the first thing people see.

I see the windows of the soul.

All of those analogies are true.

And if you haven't, I just figured I. You don't feel like people can look you in the face.

Artistically.

We are doing a restoration of something that nature produced.

It's a big burden.

It's it's it's tough to, to reproduce, and make it look lifelike, but that it it's a blessing that I've been given the gift to be able to do it.

It was very appealing to have an impact on someone's life from an artistic standpoint, where every day you would come to work and a piece of your artwork could help someone.

My name is Nancy Townsend, and I'm an ocularist.

That means I may fit and fabricate artificial eyes for a living.

You're on fall break.

Yes.

I see patients who have lost an eye due to injury or disease.

Come on in.

Gabe.

My son Gabriel is seven years old and he's in second grade.

Third year, when he was two years old.

He was diagnosed with retinoblastoma, which is a malignant tumors in the retina of the eye.

It's a pediatric cancer.

And, through series of treatments and everything, we couldn't get it under control.

So he eventually lost his right eye to the cancer.

And now he has a prosthetic eye.

His reaction was awesome.

I mean, he just stared at himself in the mirror and he thought it was wonderful.

His mom cried.

She was, you know, very.

She had been through this whole thing, she and dad.

But mom was real emotional about it.

The process was so incredible.

It wasn't anything that we had ever seen.

We didn't understand it or know about it, and it was just incredible to watch her take nothing and make this beautiful eye that perfectly matched his other one.

As we sat there and watched her paint it and everything, he started to get excited.

And then once she put it in and we held the mirror up to his face, it was just pure joy.

I mean, he he knew he felt complete and it was it was just a magical moment, really, to see that your child has gone through all this trauma is is once again complete.

I really, as a teenager, as many did not know what I was going to do.

I had applied to get my fine arts degree without really knowing what direction I would take with my artistic ability, what I'm looking at are the anatomical things in his Iris.

He has stroma.

That's the little lines that we see in our eye.

He has a lot of pattern, and he has these little brown dots which are called chromatophores.

And when you put white on black, you get a gray blue.

And that is what I create the stroma with the pattern.

And then I tint my colors on top so that I end up with the pattern showing through the color.

I think we're all guided into things for a reason.

When I was a teenager, I lost an eye due to an injury and ended up having multiple surgeries which were unsuccessful.

The irises actually got pattern striations underneath that come out to the limbus, which is that edge through between the white and the iris.

It literally caps up.

The pupil sits the furthest down, but appears to sit forward because of the amount of clear that's over top.

That clears the cornea, that sits like a contact lens over my paint, and will reproduce the image that you see in everyone's eyes.

The little white shadows that cartoonist dry draw in.

They're usually very hot.

A lot of what I do is visual.

I have a really hard time teaching someone because I do it without thought.

We have to cool.

All visual.

I'll look at an eye and go, okay, well that's dripping.

I'll just add a little bit here.

Take a little bit away there.

That's what experience does for you.

When someone starts and you have you know, ten different basic shapes and you want to wax them up and make them the right for that patient.

It is absolutely an art.

I even asked for one time, you know, being interested in it after seeing the process.

And I said, is this mostly art or is it mostly, you know, building something?

And she said, it's all the art.

She said that's where her heart was and her desire was as an artist.

And that's where her talent comes in.

And just the connection she has with the kids, and how much time and effort she puts into it.

It's truly an art and it's a gift.

She had worn a very poor prosthesis, actually, as as I remember.

And, was one of the children that didn't want her hair off her face because she had an artificial eye her whole life.

And once we had her prosthesis done, this was her follow up appointment.

And I notice that she's wearing her hair back now and, you know, was much more relaxed about the fact that she had an artificial eye.

Joe, what do you think?

Capital w small w what do you think?

Capital w children can be cruel.

I mean it, we're all the reality of of kids being cruel to one another in in school settings and things where we have to make sure that we do the best by them to make sure that the kids don't pick on them for the fact that they're they're not the same.

I consider myself an artist here at Dean McGee.

I certainly I'm always known as the artist in the building.

The rest of them take care of the medicine.

And unfortunately, when medicine fails, that's when they get to me.

So I'm actually, you know, I am the one that begins when all else has been exhausted as far as sight.

And and, these people are really at the end of the line, so they end up with, with the Ocularist the artist in the building.

And that's how they all refer to me to my medical community.

Is is awesome.

We work well together.

But, I'm certainly the art that finishes the medicine that they, you know, their sockets, they create, we work hand in hand.

There's no way we could do it without one another.

When I told somebody I have a prosthetic eye, they don't really believe me.

But they asked me a lot of questions.

When did you get it?

How old were you?

All those questions.

And I do not like answering the call.

The tweet.

You can't show me.

I want to climb a tree.

It's beautiful.

And, you know, you question, is it going to look the same?

Are people going to be able to tell?

But nobody has ever been able to tell at all.

No two eyes are the same.

I work very hard to make sure that I imitate what God gave these people, and that's a tough role to play.

I find it, you know, it's it's they do find something.

I'm blessed because I understand what these people are going through.

So it drives me to to, you know, push my artistic ability to make sure that they get what they need.