Thursday, October 30, 2008 By Melissa Martin mmartin@sunnews.comBrunswick Sun Times
It has long been said that the eyes are the windows to a person's soul.
Advertisement
What that adage fails to mention, though, is that the eyes can also be a great indicator as to what's going on in the rest of the body.
Nobody knows that better than Elizabeth Zenczak, a 15-year-old Brunswick High School sophomore whose red and painfully swollen left eye that plagued her this past spring ended up saving her life.
Zenczak's parents, Amy and Mike, say their daughter came to them back in March complaining about pressure in her ears. Because Elizabeth is a swimmer on her high school swim team, the Zenczaks knew swimmer's ear or even an ear infection was the likely culprit.
So when they took Elizabeth to the doctor a few days later, they weren't surprised when the doctor said she had a bilateral ear infection for which he prescribed an antibiotic.
The medicine cleared the infection, but the pressure didn't subside even after the swim season was over. A repeat visit to the pediatrician earned Elizabeth a trip to an ear, nose and throat specialist who was equally mystified.
Then there were the eye problems. Around the same time, the Zenczaks say, Elizabeth started complaining of a spot on and redness in her left eye. Because she had just gotten new contact lenses a few months earlier, the symptoms didn't initially concern her optometrist.
Suspecting the lenses were to blame, the eye doctor prescribed antibiotic drops and recommended she switch back to her glasses until the infection cleared.
Elizabeth followed the orders, but just like her ear, the symptoms persisted.
"Everything just started happening at once and we started living at the doctors' offices," Amy said, noting that as more symptoms appeared, she and her husband turned to the Internet for answers. The result, they say, was a long list of scary possibilities. "There were so many things it could have been that we started wondering which one to hope the problem was."
