My partners business, Millepede, has been providing professional wiring/installation products for many years. He finally figured out a great format for reducing the cost and convenience of the push-pull rods we sell into the commercial market and thought to offer them there. Then, we’re in a UPS store about 6 months ago packing up a shipment and ended up demonstrating the Mille-Rod to a group of patrons - one of which INSISTED we sell him one on the spot! Since then, every time we show them to more than 20 people, someone want to buy one for home use!

 I accidentally scratched my left eye with my sharp/ragged fingernail edge when putting in my contact lens.  ( I felt it and knew it when I did it  and it felt like a paper cut slice) I thought nothing of it. Yet the next day about 3:30 Pm in a meeting, a strange feeling came over me and my face on the left side where I scratched my eye started to feel like a numbness similar to a dental injection and at the end of the meeting the left side of my face progressively started to feel paralyzed and all my muscles on that side stopped functioning.  I immediately thought that I was either having a Stroke or Bells Palsy.

I was familiar with Bells Palsy because a girlfriend I dated in high school came down with it.  Because of the lack of additional stroke symptoms, I concluded diagnostically that it was Bells Palsy. My assistant immediately searched the Internet for Treatments for Bells Palsy.  He found a small (only 10 people) Clinical trial by a Danish Doctor that had a 100% cure in 2 weeks who disclosed thank God the exact  combination of the different medications that he used in his trial that resulted in his 100% cure.  I told my assistant Stacy that I would call my Doctor tomorrow and try that regime of medication.  He told me No, do it Now, call your doctor at home and get the prescriptions.   So I did so.  My friend the Doctor called in the prescriptions and I started the medications within an hour.  I religiously took the medications every 6 hours setting the alarm throughout the night and day for the next 2 weeks.
Meanwhile my entire left side of my face drooped – I could not even smile on that side. Everything was dead and drooped on the left side of my face. It was horrible.

It was shocking and scary and my face looked awful.   There seemed to be no progress during the first week.    No muscles were functioning from my top left eyelid down to my chin on the that side of my face.  My eye did not blink or function normally and so my left eye continuously dryed out – very uncomfortable -- and I had to add eye drop lubricants. That aggravated me since I had to bend my head back over to squeeze and dive bomb the drops which often missed my eye.  (The palsy did not affect my vision.)    So progressively I developed an anatomically eye shaped oval with a convenient ergonomic handle on it that would carry eye drops to the eye. I refined it to deliver just 1 Eye Drop to the eye without the need to bend over and without the eye drop ‘running’ down on the device.  ( Ophthalmologists say the eye can only accommodate 1 drop and that any more is superfluous and wasted.)  The device simply adapted and correlated a surface tension Affinity to hold the drop in the device and then release it to the eye via the stronger Liquid to Liquid Affinity when the liquid got in close proximity to the eye.  It worked amazingly well and was my dry eye salvation.   I quickly recognized that Being able to wet my eye with one drop Vs. using 6 or 7 drops to accomplish the same thing was a Savings of  6o to 80% on very High cost Eye Drops, in addition to the very nice aspect of not having to bend one’s head over backwards to put in the eye drops.  That seemed to me to be a real Winner that everybody could use.  Then I went further:  I one day realized that this anatomically eye shaped device had the potential to put in Contact lenses.  After a year or so, I was able to design the device to easily put in Any kind of Contact Lenses very easily and in a fraction of a second and more hygienically than ever before possible.

There now remained one more challenge:  Taking OUT contact lenses without sticking one’s fingers on the raw eyeball. After 3 yrs of experimentation, I finally figured out how to do ALL of these things and was lucky enough to be able to incorporate all of these disparate functions in one single Device, the Eye~POD™.    As Stacy commented, I turned a very devastating lemon into a lemonade.