Woman Gasps With Horror At Little’s Girl’s Missing Eye — Mom’s Story Of Reaction Goes Viral

How would you react if you saw a little girl, a normal, energetic, playful toddler who was cute and charming in every respect — but was missing an eye? A mom recently experienced how one “soccer mom” responded to her little girl, Poppy, and found a lesson to be learned. So she published her story online.

The story of the little girl and the horrified soccer mom proceeded to get a fair amount of viral attention, probably because many parents can relate to the experience — on one side or the other.

Here’s how the mom, blogger Becky Ketarkus, described the incident — starting with the story of her child.

Little Poppy, who is two years old, was adopted from China. “She came to us quickly because of her eye,” Ketarkus wrote.

The condition was no deterrent at all for Ketarkus and her family to adopt Poppy — unlike some adoptive parents, as this previous Inquisitr story explains.

The unspeakably cute little Poppy was apparently dumped by her birth parents in China because of her eye condition, a benign tumor that, while not life threatening, was incredibly painful and left untreated, would destroy the child’s eye.

Sadly, rather than treat the condition, the child’s parents simply gave up on her.

“Poppy held on long enough to get to us, where she received a state of the art surgery to remove her eye and replace it with an implant and donor tissue,” Ketarkus wrote. “Poppy was in so much pain at the time of the surgery that the actual process of removing her eye was a relief to her — 24 hours after the surgery, she was up and running around in her usual Poppy way.”

Poppy normally wears a special shield — basically a kind of artificial eye. But wearing the device can be uncomfortable, so sometimes Poppy just, well — pops out her fake eye.

“We often laugh at the inopportune moments Poppy chooses to remove her eye shield. She is 2 years old and she is rough, loud, dirty and raucous, just the way 2-year-olds should be,” wrote Katarkus. “She could care less what people think and I kind of adore that about her.”

But about two weeks ago, when one “soccer mom,” as Ketarkus described the woman, got a glimpse of Poppy, recently, she gasped in horror, blurting out loudly, “Oh my God!”

“Instead of apologizing for her outburst,” Ketrakus recounted, “she decided to defend it by saying, ‘Good lord, it caught me off guard. I wasn’t ready for that. Phew. Well, look! Now it’s in and you can’t even tell she doesn’t have an eye! Thank goodness. That was so awkward.'”

Needless to say, Ketarkus was not amused.

“I’m so sorry I caught you off guard, I thought. I’m so glad you won’t have to be faced with my daughter’s difference again… I live to make sure you don’t have to feel awkward. Sigh.”

How would you have reacted to the soccer mom if you were the mom of a little girl with a missing eye? Read the the full Becky Ketarkus blog at this link.

[Images via Yahoo! Parenting]