FOR 46 years, Jenny O’Connell was afraid to hope her sight could be restored but yesterday she saw her family for the first time. Doctors at a Dublin hospital partially restored her vision with a rare treatment.
Ms O’Connell from Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, lost her vision at the age of 11. After a complex procedure to insert an artificial cornea at the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital, she was yesterday able to see again with her right eye.
“What a shock. I just can’t believe it actually happened . . . it’s all my dreams together, but at the same time I wasn’t hoping for it, you know. I was afraid to.”
Ms O’Connell, who had never seen her husband Seán or her son and daughter before, was resting in hospital last night after being visited by family members.
“I’ve never seen what Michael and Martina looks like, any of my family, or my husband,” she told RTÉ news yesterday.
The event was tinged with added poignancy by the fact that Ms O’Connell’s husband had lost his sight in recent years due to diabetes.
The first person Ms O’Connell saw was her consultant ophthalmologist William Power, who said the treatment, known as Boston keratoprosthesis, was rare in Ireland.
“In layman’s terms it’s an artificial plastic window that goes into a person’s cornea,” he said.
Mr Power said the custom-made device had been inserted into Ms O’Connell’s eye four weeks ago and covered over with a flap of skin, which was removed yesterday.
“We’re the only centre in the country doing it. In the last five or six years we’ve put in about 13 but Jenny is quite unusual in terms of being without vision for so long.”
Mr Power said that before treatment, Ms O’Connell was only “vaguely aware” of an extremely bright light being shone in front of her right eye, and her left eye was already irreparably damaged.
But yesterday she was able to read numbers and letters on a chart when the bandage was removed two hours after the final stage of the surgery.
Ms O’Connell lost her sight following a bad reaction to a medicine, which lead to a very rare condition known as Stevens-Johnson syndrome. It was the morning of her sister’s birthday party, she recalled.
“I wasn’t feeling well and daddy called me in, came into me and said to me was I not getting up. So I asked him to put the light on and I realised he said he had the light on, so we realised it wasn’t – I couldn’t see.”
