"My crayons, my friends," she said, starting a verbal list of new things seen. "My CDs. They used to be all blurry. I can see Mariah Carey. She's American and she has the same skin as me. Her pants are red."

The colors - yellow, blue, red - don't overlap. Destiny is staying within the lines when she colors, something she couldn't have done before the implant.

Hope was in short supply when Destiny was born at Highland Hospital on May 3, 1994. Diagnosed with pneumonia, she was taken to the neonatal intensive care unit at Strong Memorial Hospital. She had cataracts - opacity in the lens - in both eyes. And she had glaucoma - increased pressure - in her right eye.

Destiny received one cadaver cornea transplant as an infant and another three or four years later. In each case, her body rejected the transplant.

This is typical in young children, Aquavella said. Their immune systems are more active than an adult's; consequently, the body works harder to reject foreign bodies.

"I like to touch a wall, to feel it when I walk," she explained on the day after her surgery. "I put my hand out to shake people's hands by hearing them."

She is small for her age, and sitting on the gurney, her hair covered by a hairnet, her legs tucked under her, she looked younger than she actually is.

Gently holding her head, he explained that the operation would be on her right eye and that she would have "zero discomfort" during the procedure.

He had chosen the right eye because it seemed better able to take the implant. If all went well, it would be the eye Destiny used in the future.

Aquavella has been performing eye surgery for decades. He remembers the slow progress of the 1950s and 1960s, when every step forward was followed by several steps back.

The Dohlman keratoprosthesis, however, is hardly routine, though it has been used on adults as a last-ditch effort to restore sight after cornea transplants have failed.

The implant has been seldom used on children, in part because in its early stages of development, it had a high failure rate caused by such complications as infections and inflammation.

But improvements in the device, and the high success rates with adults, have led Aquavella to become one of the first, if not the first, surgeon to try it on children in desperate need of help.

"This is the type of work the Rochester Eye Institute is all about," Aquavella said recently, "research even into hopeless problems with the goal of restoring and protecting vision."

The implant is a round piece of plastic that has a top half and a bottom half and a hole in the center. The top and bottom serve to clamp together a rim of donor cornea that serves as a kind of washer.

"Ophthalmologists as a group of people are compulsive and tend to be nitpickers. My theory is you were compulsive first and an ophthalmologist second. So maybe it was my personality defect that led me into the field."

She's been at the school since kindergarten, and she is a popular, familiar figure there. For the past two years she's been in a class taught by Karen Archer.

"Destiny is very bright and intelligent," said Archer. "... She's an inspiration to all of us. She never says, 'No.' She never says, 'I can't.' She never has not attempted a task. She's a role model."

Even before the surgery, Destiny moved about her classroom and the building with confidence, finding her way to the library, the chorus room, the cafeteria with no problem.

Destiny studies Braille with Kecia Binko, a teacher of the visually impaired. She's an eager student, and Braille has opened up the world of literature to her. In addition, it's allowed her to write, using a Braille typewriter.

Since the operation, Archer and Binko have had the joy of watching Destiny see better and better day by day. She's able to write smaller letters now, her words not straying off the lines.

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