Missouri teen profiled in Kansas City Star series to appear on ‘Dr. Oz’
Sitting under the stage lights, she thrilled at the sound of the audience’s applause.
“I mean, it made me happy. I was like, ‘Hell yeah, give me attention!’” said 16-year-old Jordyn Walker of Smithville, who, on Wednesday morning, caught a flight with her mother, Kendyll Walker, to New York to appear the next day to tape ABC’s “The Dr. Oz Show.”
Jordyn in June was the focus of a four-part series, “Laughing in the Dark,” in The Kansas City Star.
It followed the teen as she struggled, often with humor and asking for no pity, after being struck blind in December by a medical mystery that caused her face to swell and to bleed from her eyes. With the cause of her blindness unknown, Jordyn lived daily with the knowledge that another bout, triggered by who knew what, might take away any one of her other senses or even her life. She nonetheless approached her new reality using her Twitter feed, jay walker@_Blind_Bandit_ , to make light of living in darkness.
One typical early tweet had her staring out a window, miniblinds shut, with the caption, “The view was so beautiful this morning.”
A producer on “The Dr. Oz Show” contacted the Walkers in early November after seeing The Star series. Both Jordyn and her mother were on the program, which taped on Thursday, Jordyn said.
An air date has not been set, but Jordyn said she was told it could be as late as January. She found her TV appearance gratifying. Since she lost her sight, Jordyn has said that she has thought of trying to become a motivational speaker.
“It was really, really cool. It was just kind of everything I thought it would be, I guess,” Jordyn said. “Sitting there, doing that interview, talking to those people and getting that response from actual people kind of solidified that this is what I want to do. I want to be a speaker.”
In May, a trip to the Undiagnosed Diseases Program led by the National Institutes of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute provided Jordyn with a diagnosis — a rare, type 3 form of an already rare disorder that causes severe tissue swelling, known as hereditary angioedema. Even its most common type 1 and type 2 varieties occur in only 1 in 50,000 people.
Since the diagnosis:
”I’m great,” she said. “I’m thriving, living my best life. I have not been sick in like a total of like four months, which is a new record.”
She is mastering Braille, which stymied her early on. She’s gained greater mobility and independence. Currently a junior in high school, she has enough credits to graduate early. Her plan remains to gain enough independence to attend college at the University of Central Missouri, where she intends to study communications and psychology.
The New York trip was a whirlwind — in on Wednesday, taping Thursday morning and back in Smithville that night. It was enough time, she said, to eat New York pizza, meet up with relatives who drove in from New Jersey, and stay in a nice hotel, paid for by the show.
“We didn’t really go visit any New Yorky stuff,” Jordyn said of the city’s attractions. “I mean sightseeing would not work out for me.”
This story was originally published November 17, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
