CONYERS, Ga. -- When doctors restored Shirl Jennings' sight, his comfortable world of darkness was suddenly filled with fear and frustration.
Used to seeing nothing, suddenly seeing everything was too much of a shock. Images appeared but he didn't know what they were without touching or smelling them.Lacking any experience of depth perception, walking down the sidewalk became a frightening journey where even his own shadow confused him. He tripped over curbs, stumbled over things in his way and couldn't walk up stairs.
He didn't understand facial expressions, and when he tried to go back to work as a masseur, the body parts beneath his fingers began to disgust him.
Jennings, whose story inspired the movie "At First Sight," had no visual memory when he regained his sight at age 51. The experimental surgery fixed his eyes, but his mind didn't know how to interpret the images that were flooding his senses.
Instead of the blessing he was expecting, seeing became a daunting task. Sometimes he would just close his eyes to black out all the images that were overwhelming his mind.
"I had to go through so many adjustments," said Jennings, now 58 and living in this Atlanta suburb. "I could never figure out what I was looking at."
In the nearly eight years since the surgery restored the vision he lost as a young child, Jennings' eyesight has deteriorated to the point where he can only make out some shapes and distinguish between light and dark.
But that doesn't bother him.
"It's really more easy to be blind than see," he said.
The movie, which opened last month, stars Val Kilmer as Jennings and Mira Sorvino as his wife, Barbara. The Jennings met with the cast before shooting began.
"Mira said I gave her one of the best massages she ever had," Jennings said, instructing his wife to pull out the photo of him rubbing the actress' shoulders.
As a child growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Montvale, Va., Jennings contracted polio, meningitis and cat-scratch fever. After lapsing into a coma, doctors gave up hope for the 3-year-old boy.
"They sent me home to die, but I'm still living," he said.
He left the hospital paralyzed from the waist down and with his eyesight fading. But Jennings' mother, Pearl Layman of Roanoke, Va., nursed him back to health.
"We really worked with him. I didn't give up hope," she said.
With her help and that of his cousins, Jennings learned how to walk and talk again. But they couldn't help his deteriorating eyesight. Soon, the young boy could only differentiate between light and dark.
At age 6, Jennings went to the state institution for the deaf and blind. He then studied massage therapy and eventually took a job as a masseur at the YMCA in DeKalb County, near Atlanta.
That's where he met Barbara. They had a few dates but she married someone else and moved to Vermont. In 1988, Jennings found out that Barbara had divorced and returned to the area.
"Twenty years went by in a matter of minutes," Barbara Jennings recalled about their reunion. "It was as if we had just seen each other the day before."
About three months later, they married. But before they walked down the aisle, Barbara Jennings asked her fiance to see her family ophthalmologist, Dr. Trevor Woodhams.
"I figured I didn't have too much to lose," Jennings said.
There have been fewer than a dozen cases of long-term blindness being reversed, but Barbara Jennings thought it was strange that Jennings was able to distinguish between light and dark.
Woodhams determined that Jennings had dense cataracts but that both of his retinas were intact. Woodhams suggested surgically removing Jennings' cataracts.
The cataract from one of Jennings' eye was removed in September 1991, and the second eye was operated on about a month later.
"When they removed the patch from his eye, he was very, very quiet -- unnaturally so," Barbara Jennings said.
He could see, but he didn't know what he was seeing. Jennings couldn't distinguish between a table or chair without touching them and couldn't identify an apple or orange without smelling them.
And months after his surgery, as he was learning to handle sight, Jennings developed pneumonia, and his eyesight began deteriorating again.
Today, Jennings wears dark sunglasses to protect against ultraviolet rays that began damaging his retinas after the cataracts were removed.
He says he appreciates his short flirtation with sight. He learned to paint -- mostly landscapes, seascapes and abstracts -- a hobby he keeps up. He made frequent trips to the Georgia coast, where he would watch the freighters cruise down the river.
"I could see the boats in the Savannah River, I could see trains come by. At Tybee (Island), I could see the Spanish moss in the trees," he said, then smiled.
And despite all the problems, Jennings said he would do it all over again.
"I'm such an optimist."