Published
Article written by
Jean-Michel is 16 years old and his eyes are paralyzed. For more than 10 years, the young boy can no longer see either to the left or to the right, but only forwards. For Brut, he shares his daily life.
“I can’t even make the slightest movement of my eyes. Basically, my eyelids weren’t drooping. They fell all of a sudden. And my eyes stopped moving all of a sudden. It went paralyzed.” Jean-Michel has suffered from ptosis since he was 6 years old. Due to an abnormal drooping of his eyelids, the young boy lost a good part of his visual field. He also has ophthalmoplegia, a nerve deficiency, which blocks the movement of his eyes.
“The first time I saw a doctor, he said, ‘Is that possible? we’ve never seen this before. The doctors were shocked, because usually when patients come, it’s for something specific”. Jean-Michel lost the mobility of his eyes overnight. When he was 6 years old and out with his family, the young boy remembered “see his eyelids start to droop”. “I call my mother, I tell her: mum, mum… I can’t move my eyes anymore, my eyelids droop. And suddenly, after that, we went to the doctor, we went to the hospital, and that’s where it all started”.
In 2020, he decided to launch on Tik-Tok in order to share his story. “It was a normal thing, I did not think that I was going to have so many subscribers”he confides. “It’s important for me to talk about my illness, because I encourage everyone who is sick to ignore criticism. That they move forward because it’s part of them and if they have that, it’s not a coincidence, and even if they have that, they are unique people.