Christina Ebersohl-Van Scyoc spent a month in bed following the grim diagnosis, "just kind of bemoaning my situation and having a little pity party," she admits before finding the courage to pick up the viola.
Being declared legally blind was the driving force that led Christina Ebersohl-Van Scyoc on a path to perform viola at the world-renowned Carnegie Hall in New York City. The path to the concert is surely unique. If it not for music, she wouldn't have gotten out of bed following her diagnosis.
"I'm still waiting for someone to pinch me and wake me up," she tells Inside Edition Digital over Zoom from her Colorado Springs, Colorado, home.
When Christina was 3 years old, she had eye surgery due a condition where the muscles in her eyes didn't form right because she was born prematurely. Corrective surgery helped them stay straight. "I always had really bad eyesight. It was me and my oldest sister. We always had strabismus, and we always had just glasses, and it was just something we grew up with," she says, adding "But I never imagined not being able to see the world."
She started piano lessons at 7 years old and was in band and choir throughout high school. Christina played 13 instruments.
While studying music and taking language classes at Parkland Community College in Champaign, Illinois, she yearned for something more. "I always wanted to do something to help others. I always felt like maybe music wasn't enough to help others," she says.
Christina became drawn to the military after a political science teacher had encouraged her to look into government work. There was a linguistics position open and with all her knowledge of foreign languages, it seemed like a good fit.
"It felt like it was just the right time. I was able to do something to help others. I was able to take a step back from music and use another skill to serve the country and do something that I was really passionate about," she says about her decision to veer towards public service.
She joined the U.S. Army in 2010 as a private first class stationed in Monterey, California, at the Presidio of the Defense Language Institute.
She was honorably discharged from the army in 2012, early than expected, for medical reasons. To this day, she feels uneasy calling herself a veteran.
"It felt great to have the comradery and to feel like I was doing something noteworthy and worthwhile. Many veterans I know have served longer and done much more difficult tours than I have. So I'm very quiet usually about my veteran status because I feel very reserved about what I did. I wish I could have done more," she says.
A few months later, she started losing her eye sight. Then in 2015, she miscounted steps and fell down a flight of stairs.
"I kept having these attacks, and I kept losing more and more sight. And it happens in such gradual steps that sometimes you don't know that you're losing little bits. When I fell down the stairs was when I realized I had lost a lot more than I had really given credit to," Christina says.
Doctors diagnosed Christina with neuromyelitis optica, a disease that causes lesions on the optic nerve or the spinal cord. "It's a very cruel disease. It pretty much will take your sight once it starts to," she says.
In 2015, Christina was declared legally blind.
"When it first happened, it's a really scary thing to realize that everything is kind of surprise, and you don't know what's coming necessarily. And it's kind of overwhelming to feel like the whole world is just unknown to you at that point," she says.
She can only see light and dark out of just her left eye. "The best way I describe to people is like trying to watch a really staticky TV from really far away through a foggy window because everything else just really blurs out after that," she describes.
Christina spent a month in bed following the grim diagnosis, "just kind of bemoaning my situation and having a little pity party," she admits. "It's really hard when you spend your whole life reading music and sight-reading and using your eyesight to imagine what it's going to be like without, and I really didn't think that there was a path forward or an avenue forward."
One day while scrolling her phone, something piqued her interest. It was a video on YouTube of Biber's Passacaglia, played by Richard O'Neill, one of her all-time favorite violists.
That motivated Christina to get out of bed and learn to walk with a cane. From there, her interest in music surfaced again. And Christina picked up her viola. That fall, she went back to school. She graduated from the Portland State University in Oregon and got a master's degree in Viola Performance at the University of Denver.
A random audition led her to Carnegie Hall.
She performed for a total of five minutes on the prestigious stage.
"I got on stage, and I set my cane down and bowed. And I just kept thinking, 'Oh my God, you're in Carnegie Hall. This is actually happening.' she recalls of the exciting moment.
The best part is, Christina gets to perform again at Carnegie Hall next April, when she will play a piece by Egyptian composer Attia Sharara.
Until then, she's finishing up her doctorate degree and her dissertation on the biographies of Egyptian composers.
All of her success stems from music.
"Music was basically my reason to live and to get out of bed and to start again and to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other, so to speak."
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