Missouri teen who bled from her eyes is about to appear on TV’s ‘Dr. Oz’
Kansas City area teen Jordyn Walker, struck blind one year ago by a rare disorder, will appear on national television Friday morning.
She said one of the reasons she agreed to be on “The Dr. Oz Show” — airing in the Kansas City area at 9 a.m. on ABC affiliate KMBC — is to help inspire others and show that tragedy in life need not lead to a tragic life.
“I guess I hope they (viewers) just feel more driven to do something about their situations, whether it is good or bad or toxic, so they can be the person they want to be instead of the person they have been shaped to be,” Jordyn said Thursday. “I also hope this might be the start of my motivational speaking career. Maybe ‘Ellen,’ who knows?”
Jordyn in June was the focus of a four-part series, “Laughing in the Dark,” in The Kansas City Star.
The series followed 15-year-old Jordyn as she struggled, often with humor and asking for no pity, after a medical mystery caused her face to swell and her eyes to bleed before she went blind. With the cause unknown, Jordyn lived daily with the fear that another bout, triggered by who knew what, might take away any one of her other senses or even her life.
The “Dr. Oz Show” promotes the episode with this line: “Medical Mystery: Why is this teen crying bloody tears?”
Jordyn nonetheless approached her new reality using her Twitter feed, jay walker@_Blind_Bandit_, to make light of living in darkness.
“I’m great,” Jordyn said recently. “I’m thriving, living my best life.”
Jordyn is a junior at Smithville High School and also takes classes at the Kansas State School for the Blind. Over the last year, she has grown ever confident in mastering Braille and has also become more independent with the use of her cane.
Her plan is to graduate high school and attend the University of Central Missouri on her own, where she wants to study psychology and communications.
In May, a trip to the Undiagnosed Diseases Program in Maryland, 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.
In November, the “Dr. Oz Show” flew her and her mother to New York City to tape the episode.
Typical humor: “One thing I definitely took away from this is that Dr. Oz has very soft hands,” Jordyn said.
This story was originally published December 5, 2019 at 3:19 PM.
