Blind Iraqi Woman Regains Sight After 18 Years
In 1994, 21-year-old Gula Namiq Hassan was living in a Sulaymaniyah, north of Bagdad and in the wrong place at the wrong time when shrapnel from a nearby car bomb blast pierced her eyes, blinding her, presumably thought at the time, forever. Her right eye had to be removed, and her left eye was damaged from the cornea to the retina.
Skip forward to 2011, and an Iraqi ophthalmologist told Gula and her family that the pioneering eye surgeon Dr. Amar Agarwal, father of the glued intraocular lens (IOL) technique from Chennai, India, could help. In July of that year they visited Dr. Agarwal at his world-leading eye hospital in Chennai.
The patient needed a year of medication to prepare for the operation
Dr. Agarwal assessed Gula and decided that he could help her, but she needed time. He told her that her blood pressure was currently too high. He put her on medication to lower it, and to stimulate the nerves in the eye, which had over the years become shrouded in membrane. It would be extremely tense operation, as Dr. Agarwal knew that the eye would not survive multiple operations. He only had one chance.
New technology from a world-leading doctor helped to restore her sight
On May 28 2012, Dr. Agarwal and his team began the operation to restore the sight in Hassan’s one remaining eye. He started by removing the thick membrane coating the pupil in a vitrectomy, and then fixed an intraocular lens using fibrin glue. As the original lens had been removed following the bomb blast, there was no support on which to place the intranocular lens, so they used a folded lens, Dr. Agarwal explained afterwards.
In any case, the operation was a success. The very next day when her dressing was removed, Gula Hassan said that she was able to see. Three days later, she was able to read, identify colours and walk independently. She was accompanied to Chennai by her brother-in-law Mahmud, and will now travel back to Sulaymaniyah to be reunited with her husband, who works in a hospital there, and she will be able to see her children, aged four and seven, for the first very time.
Dr. Agarwal perhaps summed it up best. “What war took away, technology has given back,” he said afterwards.
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