She called her niece in Kansas. Could she please get online and vote for Ben so he could win free LASIK surgery? And, oh, could she get a hold of Aunt Denise and Uncle Art, too?

Emy Stahl wasn’t shy. She asked everyone at work and everyone at the grocery store and everyone at the gas station back home in Tecumseh.

Excuse me … my son Ben, entered this contest …

The mother is sitting in a back office at Eye Surgical Associates in Lincoln.

Her Ben, her blue-eyed baby, the youngest of her and Joe’s three kids, is in a surgical suite, getting rid of his 20/400 vision.

Getting rid of his glasses and those awful contacts.

The contacts were the worst, Emy says. In the morning, wedged in the bathroom with Ben and his wheelchair — what a battle it was to make him see.

He’d squeeze his eye shut before she could slip in the right contact, and she’d have to pry it back open.

Once she got the dang thing to fit on his eyeball, it would pop back out or sting so bad she had to take it out and start over.

Then it was time for the left eye.

It took 30 minutes every morning. Then he’d wheel into in his van with the hand controls and drive to class at Southeast Community College in Lincoln.

Sometimes, there was swearing during those 30 minutes. (Sometimes, it was Emy.)

Then last month, driving to work, listening to her favorite radio station, she found a solution.

Win the “Gift of Sight!” the ad said. Tell us why you need LASIK, and one lucky person will receive free surgery for the holidays!

All Ben needed to do was write an essay explaining why he would be the perfect person for this perfect present.

Sutton Linder & Sutton would post the entries on its Web site and the voting would begin.

This would be great for Ben, his mother thought.

Ben thought so, too.

So on the very last day before the contest ended, Ben wrote an essay.

He explained that since that day 3½ years ago, a month after his high school graduation, when he fell asleep driving and ended up in a ditch, he’s been called two things.

“Handsome and a quadriplegic.”

His mom calls him handsome, he wrote.

His doctors call him quadriplegic.

He wrote about the dark times.

And he wrote about how he saw the world: Full of possibility.

He wrote about the list he keeps in his mind: To feed himself and button his shirt. To get his own apartment. To have kids one day.

“To run with my children, I need a miracle.”

Ben knows that’s miles down his list. While he waits, he wants to accomplish all the others.

And not having to hassle with contacts would bring him that much closer to living on his own and being independent.

Ben can feed himself and he can button his shirt and he can drive.

“I’ve accomplished every goal I had the power to,” he wrote. “So if you so graciously could, please help me cross off the next obstacle that stands in my way.”

And the voters did.

Sutton Linder & Sutton received 240 nominations. It picked 10 finalists. (In the end, the doctors decided to donate surgery to the top three vote-getters.)

Votes came from all over the world.

More than half were for a young man named Ben.

People felt so deeply about his story that two of the other finalists told family members that if they won, they’d donate their LASIK to Ben.

An anonymous donor even promised to pay for the procedure in case Ben didn’t win. And when he did, the donor gave the money anyway, to help his family with medical expenses or anything else Ben needs.

Ben had his eyes shut when he left Lincoln on Wednesday afternoon. The valium they gave him before the surgery made him a little loopy.

His mom had already made her way through a Kleenex or two. She was ready to drive home and help her son in the house and head back to work.

And she’ll wake up in the morning and wait for her son to open his eyes, a mother with one less thing on her list of things to worry about.

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.