LAMBERTVILLE — Thanks to a medical diagnosis and therapy, Lambertville teen Brenden Koenig gets to do what he loves: take care of animals.
Last spring, Brenden, 14, even became a beekeeper.“He has to be able to see the bees, the little cells and pick out the queen. He’s thriving. Without that therapy, I don’t think he’d have been able to consider doing that,” Brenden’s mom, Natalie, said.
For years, Brenden suffered from an undiagnosed visual processing disorder.“Things just didn’t have clarity. Words were moving. Certain things didn’t have defined edges. A pile of peas would look like a pile of green. He could not see the tiny round balls,” Natalie said.“The words turned into two,” Brenden explained. “Everything turned into two. I was seeing double. The second one moved around a bit. I couldn’t control it at that point.”
Brenden is the youngest of two sons of Jason and Natalie Kismarton. He’s a freshman at Michigan Connections Academy , an online public school.
Around age 7, Brenden started wondering if others saw life as he did.“I was not expecting that was normal,” Brenden said. “At one point, I started asking others if they also saw double randomly.”