Eagles Eye Mobile is scoring big

TWO YEARS AGO, Mabel Ristine was at her wit's end. Her 13-year-old son Thomas' left eye turned inward so severely that it appeared to be staring at the bridge of his nose.

For years, Ristine, a working mother of four constantly struggling to keep up with the bills in her bustling Wissinoming household, had tried everything that her health insurance would allow, including a patch over Thomas' "good" eye to strengthen the crossed eye, and an ineffective succession of eyeglasses.

The one thing her health insurance wouldn't pay for was surgery to repair weak muscles in Thomas' left eye and return it to normal position and function.

Unable to see clearly, Thomas struggled in school. As he entered adolescence, he was getting detentions for reasons he didn't want to talk about. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know why," his mother said. "Kids can be cruel."

And then, one October morning in 2007, like the answer to Ristine's prayers, the Eagles Eye Mobile rolled up to Penn Treaty Middle School, in Fishtown.

It was making its annual rounds to dozens of Philadelphia public schools, examining thousands of children like Thomas who had failed their state-mandated eye exam by the school nurse but had not received follow-up care.

As the national debate over lack of adequate health care for millions of Americans rages on, the Eagles Eye Mobile has examined 26,000 low-income schoolchildren since 1996 and provided free eyeglasses to the 75 percent who needed them.

The Eye Mobile served 3,351 kids last year, providing 2,352 with prescription eyeglasses and referring 369 for further treatment, including surgery.

The Eagles pay for the Eye Mobile exams and glasses. Longtime partner St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, and new partners Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Wills Eye Institute, arrange funding for surgery.

Thomas was one of 14,000 Philadelphia schoolchildren who fail the mandatory school-eye exam every year but whose vision problems go untreated. Why?

"My health plan at work said there wasn't anything they could do for Thomas' eye," Ristine said. "They acted like it was cosmetic."

Ristine said her employee health plan allowed Thomas to visit the eye doctor and get new glasses only once every two years.

"So if he needed a different prescription because his vision was getting worse, my health insurance didn't cover that," she said.

"I work in a warehouse," Ristine said. "Most people like me live paycheck to paycheck. When you have four children, how are you going to pay the bills every week and still pay for your children's glasses because your insurance doesn't? Not every parent can afford to give their child the medical care they need. It's a terrible burden."

Dr. Carter Liotta, the optometrist from St. Christopher's Hospital for Children who has served on the Eagles Eye Mobile since 2003, examined Thomas and referred him for surgery.

"A lot of insurance companies say eye- turn-in surgery is cosmetic, as if it's tooth- whitening that we're asking for or a nose job," Liotta said.

"Clearly, if one of your eyes isn't straight, it isn't working right and needs to be corrected surgically. How could insurance companies look at a kid like Thomas and say it's just a cosmetic issue?"

Although he has examined thousands of children, Liotta remembers Thomas well.

"When I first met him, I couldn't tell you what Thomas' face looked like. He shuffled in. His head was down. His baseball cap was low over his face. I knew this was affecting his self-esteem."

Thomas' successful eye surgery at St. Christopher's in January 2008 changed his life.

"The doctor said Thomas' bad eye was so out of focus, so blurry, that he was only using his good eye most of the time and he was straining it," Ristine said. "Thomas shut down in school because he just couldn't do it anymore."

After surgery, Thomas went home to find a get-well card signed by Eagles players and an Eagles football signed by star running back Brian Westbrook.

"He went back to school the second week of January and went from F's to C's, and then to A's and B's by the end of the year," Ristine said. "Amazing."

This was the second time that the Eagles Eye Mobile rode to the rescue of Ristine's children.

A few years ago, her daughter Sarah received surgery for a similar turn-in condition.

Ristine has seen both Sarah, 17, now at Franklin Learning Center, and Thomas, 15, now at Stephen A. Douglas High, become much happier, more outgoing kids since their surgeries.

"It's simple: if kids can't see properly, they're not going to perform in school," said Dr. Nicole DeLarato, the pediatric ophthalmologist at St. Christopher's that Eagles Eye Mobile kids are referred to when they need more than glasses. "Once they get the eye care they need . . . life immediately gets better."

The new Eagles Eye Mobile, which just replaced the 13-year-old original one, looks more like a fan cave you'd find in the den of an obsessed Eaglemaniac than it does a doctor's office.

Waiting to see Dr. Liotta, children sit in authentic Lincoln Field Stadium seats in front of a life-size photo mural of a crowd of kids cheering in the stadium.

Feet sunk into the wall-to-wall Eagles-green carpet, the young patients are surrounded by Birds' memorabilia including a helmet covered with autographs, a Westbrook-signed football and a Donovan McNabb jersey signed by "5" himself.

"It's like stepping into Eagles Nirvana," Liotta said. "If this were the Eagles Hair Mobile, it would be equally cool."

The Eye Mobile's exterior is a portrait gallery of Eagles stars wearing glasses, including wide receiver DeSean Jackson, defensive end Trent Cole, tight end Brent Celek, kicker David Akers and Jermane Mayberry - the former Birds' offensive lineman (1996-2004), who donated $100,000 in his rookie year to get the whole thing started.

Mayberry, who is legally blind in his left eye due to a childhood affliction that went untreated until it was beyond repair, wanted to prevent schoolchildren here from suffering a similar fate.

"Put a fist over your eye," Mayberry told a Daily News reporter, speaking from Austin, Texas, where he and his wife are Jehovah's Witness ministers. "That's how I see out of my left eye. I can see movement. I can see color. I can't see details."

As soon as he signed his Eagles contract, Mayberry insisted on making sure economically disadvantaged children here received first-class eye care.

"I was really adamant about giving the kids glasses with nice frames," Mayberry said. "My first pair of glasses was hideous. I was 16, 17, and I hated wearing them. You can give kids glasses, but if they're not stylish, the kids won't wear them."

Mayberry said he was "blown away" by how deeply committed the Eagles were to the Eye Mobile, years after his tenure here.

Ristine feels the same way. "It's not like you buy Eagles tickets and you get a pair of glasses for your kid," she said. "They're doing this out of the kindness of their hearts.

"Health-insurance companies treat kids like numbers. But on the Eagles Eye Mobile, every kid is treated like a human being who deserves a chance."

One of the Eye Mobile's original partners, Wills Eye Institute, returns this year in the person of Dr. Alex V. Levin, chief of pediatric ophthalmology and ocular genetics, a Philly native who left to practice medicine in Canada for 17 years after "seeing patients turned away in this city because they couldn't afford care or had the wrong insurance.

"It turned my stomach," he said. "I couldn't practice medicine that way.

"In Canada, everyone has equal and open access to health care," Levin said. "When I was recruited by Wills, I told them I could not come back to Philadelphia - where 14,000 children fail a vision screening every year and never see an eye doctor - unless I could deliver health care the Canadian way.

"The Eagles Eye Mobile program fits me like a glove on a hand."