If you tear up a bit while reading this post, we won’t judge you. Feel your feelings.
Twenty years ago, Ian Tibbetts, a former factory worker from Telford in Shopshire, UK, suffered a catastrophic injury while removing a piece of scrap metal from an oven. The metal struck him in his right eye, lacerating his cornea in six places. Slowly, over the next ten years, Tibbetts completely lost sight in both eyes. Raising two young children with his wife, Tibbetts could only tell his sons apart by the sound of their voice. Tibbetts had no hope for regaining his vision; that is, until he met Professor Christopher Liu at the Sussex Eye Hospital in Brighton.
Professor Liu has been performing Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprothesis (OOKP), the reconstruction of a new eye using a tiny plastic lens and one of the patient’s own teeth, for the last MILLION YEARS. The two stage surgery involves the removal of a piece of tooth from the patient’s mouth, which is then cut to shape and an optical cylinder is inserted into a drilled hole. The tooth is then inserted into a pouch cut in the flesh under the non-operative eye, while a flap of skin is removed from the inside of the cheek and stitched on the front of the eye that’s due to receive the tooth. Four months later, when the tooth has developed a blood supply, another operation is carried out to remove part of the cornea, which is then replaced with the tooth that has been resting inside of the patient’s cheek.
“The technical success rate is close to 100 percent,” says Professor Liu, “The number of people who will see well for a very long time is two-thirds to three-quarters.”
Tibbets, whose vision is now at about 40 percent, has a pink eye with a black pupil. Though strangers sometimes stare, he doesn’t mind.
Tibbets once saw his children as “just shapes.” Now, he can see their individual faces. He explains the experience of seeing his children for the first time: "I just cried, gave them a big hug and a kiss.”
