Blind patient of 20 years sees '20/20' again!
I was kindly referred a 67 year old white female patient from Mohave Eye Center for a prosthetic contact lens.
This patient suffered a trauma in the left eye 20 years ago (hit with a baseball), which caused her to have very poor vision. Then, over the years she developed a cataract that needed to be removed.
The cataract was removed, but there was no lens placed after, which is called Aphakia. This causes the patient to have very blurry vision, but for her, it probably was not much of a difference since she has suffered from poor vision for the last 20 years.
You can also see above that her iris is very large, creating a very large pupil. This issue with a large, fixed pupil is that patients can become very light sensitive.
Her main complaint was that her left eye is so light sensitive, she has to walk around with the left eye closed for most of the day.
So the original plan was I was going to color match the left eye and create a prosthetic soft contact lens with an opaque iris. This will create a smaller artificial pupil and allow less light into her eye.
However, to our surprise and her surprise, when I trialed a diagnostic scleral lens, she was able to achieve 20/20 vision with a +13.00 over-refraction!
She was so happy that she was in tears because she hasn't seen that well out of her left eye in 20 years.
So, we redirected our plan and now we are going to order a scleral lens to improve her vision. Since the vision potential is 20/20 out of that eye, I think her depth perception and overall quality of vision is going to be amazing.
We are so thrilled for her.
Thank you to Dr. Widdison from Mohave Eye Center for thinking of us to care for this very special patient.
