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First surgery in bid to restore blinded boy’s sight a success
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The six-year-old boy whose eyes were gouged out in a horrific attack late last month got implants yesterday as the first step toward fitting realistic moving artificial eyes.
The implants are a precursor to fitting the boy with prosthetic eyes that will look and move more like normal eyes, but do not restore vision.
The five-hour operation, conducted by a team led by Hong Kong-based eye expert Dennis Lam at his hospital in the southern city of Shenzhen, was completed yesterday evening.
Lam offered free surgery after hearing the brutal story of the boy from north China’s Shanxi Province.
Inggie Ho, an assistant to Dr Lam, said that the surgery had gone well and the little boy should be fitted with prosthetic eyes in four to six weeks.
The ocular prosthesis will give the appearance of a normal eye.
Lam was optimistic about the boy’s recovery and said he will be able to produce tears normally when he recovers.
The hospital will train the boy to use a sensory navigation tool by the end of this year, which he will be able to use to walk independently.
The hospital has contacted several psychological experts to give the boy counseling in the near future, Lam said.
The boy, also known as Bin Bin, was brave before the operation, smiling as he was pushed to the operating theater. Lam said the boy told him before the surgery: “I want to be a man. I will not cry.”
Lam said Guo’s right eye was implanted with a prosthetic eyeball as there was enough soft tissue left to hold it in place, while the left one was fashioned using his own fatty tissue.
Doctors said the boy was aware his eyes had been gouged out but he told them he still wanted to see the world.
Lam says future technology might help Guo regain up to 40 percent of his lost vision.
The next stage of treatment will be the fitting of tiny cameras to Guo’s eyeballs which will relay a signal, based on the shape of objects, to an electric pulse generator connected to his tongue. With training, he will be able to make out shapes, Lam said.
Lam hopes the boy may eventually partially regain his sight using “bionic eyes” linked directly to the brain — but said this technology was at least five to 10 years away. “We don’t know if this will be successful in the end, but if there is this possibility, then why should we not give a chance to little Bin Bin?” he told reporters.
Lam’s medical team visited Guo in Shanxi Province on September 1 and offered to treat the boy free of charge.
Guo’s parents took him to Lam’s hospital in Shenzhen a week later.
Zhang Huiying, 41, the boy’s aunt, has been identified by police as the suspect in the attack based on investigations and DNA test results last week.
She took her own life when she jumped down a well on August 30, six days after Bin Bin’s attack, local police said.
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