Chandler Plante was 21 years old and healthy until she contracted COVID-19 in December 2020. The following months brought relentless migraines and a strange tingling in her hands that no one could explain.
She thought it was caused by stress, until in March 2021 she arrived at an emergency room in New York with her left arm numb and her tongue tingling. She fainted right there, but the doctors told her to stay calm, saying it was only an anxiety attack, reinforcing what she believed was stress-related.
A serious mistake.
Three months later, Chandler was out with someone when the left side of her face began to droop. The young woman attributed it to the anxiety the doctors had mentioned, but in reality she was having a stroke.
The doctors seemed skeptical that she had suffered a stroke, and it wasn’t until someone beside her insisted on her behalf that they performed a contrast-enhanced MRI. Her carotid arteries were critically narrowed. She had suffered an ischemic stroke, something almost unheard of at her age. They inserted stents, a tube made of fine mesh that keeps blood vessels open.
It seemed like the end of the nightmare. It wasn’t.
The young woman went through 6 different doctors, but no one could tell her what was wrong with her or why she had suffered that stroke.
Months later, she woke up with pain behind her right eye. Tests showed a mass that appeared to be a brain tumor. “We almost celebrated with my mom. A tumor can be removed, it can be given a name”, said Chandler. But unfortunately, it wasn’t cancer. It was inflammation with no clear cause, which eventually compressed her optic nerve until she lost vision in that eye.
The loss was difficult to accept. Chandler had to get used not only to living with sight in just one eye, but also to recognizing herself in the mirror with a different appearance. However, little by little, she began to reconcile with that part of her story.
Today she has become a well-known content creator focused on disability and vision loss. Rather than hiding her eye, she turned it into one of the most recognizable elements of her videos: she puts makeup on it, matches different patches with her outfits, and uses striking prosthetic eyes, with colors, designs, and even glitter.
What for years had been a symbol of illness and loss also ended up becoming a tool for rebuilding her confidence and helping others feel comfortable with their own appearance.
“Positivity is the only thing that kept me going”, she says.