My patients

I’ve been fortunate to treat many wonderful patients, but a few cases stand out as being memorable.

Life begins at 90

Recently, I saw a man who was 90 years old. In the 1940s, whilst working for the WWII effort in a munitions factory in London, he received an injury from a flying piece of metal that embedded in his retina, which blinded him and left him with vision in one eye only.

It was a very serious injury in those days – the force of the metal hitting the eye caused contusional damage, plus further injury as the metal was in transit until it landed on the retina and caused more problems, such as a haemorrhage (which scarred the retina). Even worse, back then, antibiotics for the eye didn’t exist.

While they managed to extract the metal at Moorfields Eye Hospital Londonwith a large magnet, the vitreous haemorrhage and a dense cataract (which can occur with eye trauma) left him blind in the damaged eye.

Fast forward about 42 years, and he has moved from the UK to Australia. After decades of relying on his one good eye, that, too, was causing him serious loss of vision, due to a rapidly progressing cataract. When the cataract was finally rock hard, he came to me. For years he was worried about surgery on his good eye, but very courageously he asked me to perform cataract surgery.

While I’m pleased to say that his cataract operation proved extremely successful, with return of 20/20 vision to that eye, what happened next is really exciting. I testing his injured eye with ultrasound examination and pupil tests and, to my surprise we discovered the eye might have some visual potential. I performed a vitrectomy and then further cataract surgery on the injured eye.

The very happy result was that, after four decades, he has good sight in both eyes. As he said to me, ‘Life beings at 90!”. Mind you, he was also lucky – the metal fragment was just 1mm away from the fovea, so it miraculously left him with intact central vision Just one week later, after his post-operative check, he could read small print and saw 5lines of writing on the visual chart.

More patient stories

Another story involves two women who happen to be good friends. Both suffered loss of sight from macular holes and, remarkably, both had received treatment that had failed.

Needless to say, both were very depressed and had little confidence in being able to regain their sight. One of them had resorted to placing magnifying glasses all over the house.

I operated on one of these ladies with success. This encouraged the other to agree to treatment.

It was great to help both friends regain their sight again. It’s a real privilege to be lucky enough to change people’s lives so dramatically and the satisfaction I receive is very hard to put into words.