In June 2023, Jim McDermott was in a serious car accident. The married father of two girls had a “normal, steady life with a full-time job” and was involved in church and ministry outreach.

But on his way home from work one day, everything would change. The accident left him with a significant traumatic brain injury. McDermott underwent frontal lobe and sinus surgery to repair a cerebrospinal fluid leak.

“I was in a coma for nearly a month and a half,” he tells Upworthy. “As I was starting to wake up, the doctors realized that I had significant optic nerve damage in both eyes. What started out with blurry vision led to full blindness of no light perception (NLP) by the time I came home from the hospital.”

Recovery would be a long process, but it would lead him to a life-changing resource: a yellow lab named Keanu, whom McDermott met through Guiding Eyes for the Blind.

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Recovering and connecting with Guiding Eyes for the Blind

When McDermott woke up from the coma,........

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