This North Jersey softball player nearly lost sight in one eye. Now, she’s back in the game

By: Darren Cooper / NorthJersey.com

The doctor held up a saline bottle and asked Nicolette Sasso if she could see the color on top.

She couldn’t even see the bottle.

“Legally blind is 20-100 and when I was in the hospital, I was 20-800,” Sasso remembered.

Stricken with what doctors later surmised to be optic neuritis, Sasso, a sophomore at Hawthorne, lost almost her entire vision in her right eye after Labor Day.

It was a long, frightening journey for a couple of weeks, with not many obvious answers in sight.

Today, Sasso is a week away from turning 16. She’s back on the Hawthorne softball team, batting and playing the outfield. She’s working. She’s playing flag football. She’s riding next to her older sister Isabella – who she calls her co-pilot – in her Hyundai Sonata.

No one ever says the word blind, but the Sasso sisters do talk about how scary those weeks were back in September. Nicolette couldn’t see. No one knew why.

Now Nicolette says her right eye is still a little dim, but she tracks the ball just fine in the outfield and is one of the Bears’ best hitters.

“She is our spark plug,” Hawthorne softball coach Mook Iannacone said. “When she gets on base, we get going. She is learning center field on the fly and gives us that option to play a little shallow and keep the bloops from falling in.

A shadow forms

Nicolette remembers all the details clearly. Her family was coming back from Labor Day weekend down the Shore. Her right eye seemed a bit off. It felt cloudy, the way it might feel when she first wakes up in the morning.

She didn’t think that much of it and went to school.

There, she noticed it wasn’t getting any better. She recognized that her left eye was fine, but her right eye was still foggy. She couldn’t see the board. She had a headache.

“I told my mom we needed to make a doctor’s appointment,” Nicolette said.

At first, doctors thought she had a torn retina in her right eye. She had been playing ping-pong down the shore and had actually gotten hit in the head. Could that be it?

The test results were inconclusive. The only thing clear was that her eyesight was getting worse.

“All the tests they were doing, the first day, I could read the letters few levels in, the second day, I could barely read the first level,” Nicolette said. “By the time we got down to Philadelphia [to Children’s Hospital] to the emergency room I couldn’t even see the screen on the board.”

Finding the light

Back home in Hawthorne, friends and family rallied around the Sassos. Isabella, a senior, was still going to school and worried.

“I didn’t go to the hospital, I was just wondering what happened,” she said. “I didn’t want to call her with everything going on. I was scared. There was a lot going on. She would just say ‘I can’t see out of my eye.’”

Nicolette went through multiple MRIs. They did a spinal tap. In the span of one week, her eye went from normal to 20-800.

All the tests kept coming back negative. The case presented itself as optic neuritis, but it wasn’t a slam dunk.

Optic neuritis is inflammation of the optic nerve, but it can be the precursor to more serious diseases, and it’s often linked to multiple sclerosis.

Doctors made the decision to give Nicolette a heavy dose of steroids intravenously. They made Nicolette sluggish and sleepy, but they worked.

“By the fifth day of that was when I finally thought I was seeing results,” she said. “I could finally see that saline bottle.”

Nicolette went back to 9th Avenue in Hawthorne, taking oral steroids. She went back to school. Her vision was getting stronger.

Suiting back up

Nicolette is not one for sitting still. She’s been a cheerleader – alongside Isabella – most of her life. She played softball at a young age, saying her favorite part is running the bases, sliding and getting dirty.

Sports offered a chance at a diversion, so when she had a chance to play a fall ball game, she took advantage.

“She was playing at the end of October,” Isabella marveled. “She was pushing to get cleared. She was the happiest person I have ever seen.”

“When I heard what happened, the concern was will she be all right? Is this permanent?” Iannacone said. “Then she slowly started play in some fall games and was able to cheer. The way she plays now, I can’t see – no pun intended – this holding her back in any way.”

Nicolette said that, for a while, it was hard to track a ball in flight. Physical education class could be difficult because, in volleyball or football, the ball would move in stop motion. Like, it would be there. Blink. It would be somewhere else. Like a strobe effect.

However, she returned to the field without any issues. She started cheering again and when the Bears softball season started, coaches penciled her in to play outfield.

“The color is still off, but I can see things, it just takes a split second more to render,” Nicolette said. “And when I read, sometimes instead of reading the full word I see the letters and make out the word, but that’s just when I use the right eye. When I use both eyes, I see completely normal.”

Seeing the future

Nicolette went back to her neural ophthalmologist earlier this month. The doctor said her condition had to be optic neuritis for two reasons: one, they ruled out just about everything else, and two, her optic nerve shows scar tissue.

No one will probably ever know the cause and Nicolette still wonders why her case never showed up in a scan if it was that severe.

“Sometimes it just happens,” she said. “And that’s what happened to me, unless there is some other test they forgot to do … but I highly doubt it.”

Nicolette laughs at that last comment. She went through quite an ordeal but can joke about it now. She has to stay in touch with doctors and be aware of any possible MS symptoms, but other than that, she’s back to normal.

She doesn’t need glasses. She just wants to get back to her cheerleading team, back to riding in the car with Isabella, back in the Bears outfield, and back to soaking up the spring sun and basking in the light.

Darren Cooper is a peachy-keen high school sports columnist for NorthJersey.com. For full access to live scores, breaking news and analysis from our Varsity Aces team, subscribe today. To get breaking news directly to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter and download our app.     Email: cooperd@northjersey.com      Twitter: @varsityaces