Boy Wears Eyepatch in First School Photo—Had No Idea the Danger He’d Beaten

A man who lost his eye to cancer as a child has shared a school photograph taken not long after, and which one commenter said made him “the coolest kid in class.”

Dertrick Winn Jr, 31, from Austin, Texas, took to Reddit’s r/OldSchoolCool on June 17 via his account u/ninjadertie, where he wrote simply: “I lost my eye to cancer when I was about 5. This is me on my first picture day (1998).”

Attached to the post was the school photograph, with Winn beaming at the camera, his denim shirt buttoned up to the last, and a large black patch covering one of his eyes.

“It’s honestly my favorite photo ever, and the memories that it triggers are all good ones,” he told Newsweek.

“I got a lot of comments saying I was brave, and a warrior, and an inspiration. Those comments are very kind. I’m sure they were all true about me, but what’s also the truth is I had no idea the kind of danger I had overcome.

“I was treated with so much love and attention that I probably just thought I had the flu or something. I spent most of my time in the hospital playing video games, watching the Power Rangers movie on repeat and chasing medicine with apple juice. The whole thing felt like a sweet adventure and the older I get, the more I’m convinced that that is exactly what it was.”

He remembers it all, he told Newsweek—“I even remember the first day waking up after my enucleation, the surgical removal of my eyeball.”

Enucleation sees the entire eye removed, but the muscles that control eye movement left intact and resewn to the artificial eye, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Winn shared in a Reddit comment that he now uses a fake eye.

Recalling the surgery, Winn said he and his family were staying at the Ronald McDonald House, which houses the families of sick children, and he awoke with a “huge egg-shaped bandage on my eye.

“But even then, I didn’t really seem to ‘get’ that my right eye had been removed. It was almost as if nothing changed at all, and honestly, I may have been too young to comprehend what exactly had taken place.”

He called the “eye patch days” at school “a bit of a blur,” but remembers “getting a lot of attention from my fellow classmates”. Most of it was general curiosity, he said, adding that he doesn’t recall any bullying or “anything negative at all.”

Despite his huge positivity, with Winn revealing his memories of cancer treatment are “mostly fond ones,” there are still some things he is “haunted” by, he admitted.

Slipping in and out of consciousness under anaesthesia, still “mumbling words of encouragement” to his mother who was by his side at every moment; trying to get out of a hospital bed and being “pushed back down by several clammy, gloved hands” who he understands now weren’t trying to hurt him, but whose weight he can still remember; and above all, “the smell of those medical masks.”

“I have had to wear the mask again for things like dental surgery and lasik and other post-cancer related things in adulthood,” he said, and has to steel himself—”because as soon as I get a whiff of that mask, I can almost surely feel the hands pressing me against the bed.”

He recalled his mother—who is working on a book on her and her son’s story—being by his side for everything he went through, even though she was so young herself at the time.

“She was 14 when she gave birth to me and had to become an emancipated minor to sign all of the paperwork at the appointments,” he said.

“My dad stayed behind to work, so most of the trips to Houston were just little me and teenage her on a Greyhound.”

Winn’s Reddit post of his five-year-old self in the eyepatch caught a huge amount of attention, racking up more than 100,000 likes, as one commenter wrote simply: “This would literally be the coolest kid in the class and no one would be able to top this.”

“Losing an eye to cancer sucks. You’re a warrior,” another praised Winn, as another said he was “cute but brave too”—to which Winn replied: “My parents are the brave ones.”