When Creed Petit was just a toddler, his parents noticed that he wasn’t hitting childhood milestones. He was seen by a number of doctors, but it was Dr. Byron Lam, a neuro-ophthalmologist and gene therapy expert at the niversity of Miami’s No. 1-ranked Bascom Palmer Institute, who diagnosed Petit with Leber Congential Amaurosis, a blinding disease caused by a genetic mutation.
Treatments were still undergoing clinical trials, but hope came in March 2018, when Dr. Audina Berrocal and her team performed a newly approved surgery, making Bascom Palmer one of only eight institutes in the country offering this type of gene therapy treatment and making Petit the youngest patient to receive it.
Petit’s mother, Sarah, explained that the Bascom Palmer team’s compassion and understanding gave Creed and his family the peace of mind to pursue the surgery. When he was wheeled into the operating room, the surgery team, led by Dr. Berrocal, sang his favorite song, the theme song from the TV show Friends.
Today, Creed is doing everything a nine-year-old child should: He’s excelling in school, exploring, asking questions, and living his dream of seeing a real-life rainbow.
