Canadian woman hopes to regain eyesight through rare 'tooth in eye' surgery

In a rarest of rare incident, a Canadian woman, Gail Lane, who has been blind for a decade, hopes to get her eyesight back through a unique surgery using one of her teeth. The woman underwent the operation earlier this week at Mount Saint Joseph Hospital in Vancouver.

As mentioned in the Facebook post by the hospital, it is Canada’s very first reported case of such a surgery.

Ophthalmologist and surgeon at the hospital, Dr Greg Moloney, as per a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) report, said, "It is a rare operation that most people have not heard of, even if you are an eye surgeon."

The social media post, explaining how the surgery is performed, mentioned, “Known as “tooth-in-eye surgery”, this innovative and rare procedure involves implanting a small lens inside one of the patient’s own teeth. The tooth is then placed in the eye, creating a new window for vision. This week, Gail became the first patient in Canada to undergo this remarkable surgery at Mount Saint Joseph Hospital.”

Moloney is part of the surgical team that performed Tuesday’s ground-breaking surgery. The doctor and his team extracted a canine tooth from Gail Lane, carved out a hole to make room for a plastic lens, and sewed the tooth to the inside of her cheek, a CTV report said.

The tooth will be left there for three months so that it can grow the necessary tissue growth for the subsequent eye embed, the report added.

The publication, quoting Dr Moloney, said, “(The tooth) doesn’t have any connective tissue that I can actually pass a suture through to connect it to the eyeball.”

“So the point of implanting it for three months is for it to gain the layer of supporting tissue,” he explained.

Dr Moloney said that he has performed seven successful tooth-in-eye surgeries in his native Australia before he was recruited to do them in Canada. He also added that most people react to such a procedure with shock and horror, the CBC report added.

“I haven’t seen myself for 10 years,” Lane said. “If I’m fortunate enough to get some sight back, there will be wonderful things to see,” she added.

Moloney has cautioned those seeing the procedure as a miracle cure for blindness. The doctor asserted, “It's not a cure-all for every vision problem. It's specifically meant for people with severe corneal blindness in the front of the eyes caused by conjunctival scarring from autoimmune diseases, chemical burns and other traumas, but who still have healthy retina and optic nerves in the back of their eyes.”