When Gail Lane went blind 11 years ago, she didn’t think she’d ever be able to see again.
“It was like an overnight thing,” the Victoria, B.C., 75-year-old said.
“It was scary. It was sad. I thought about all the things I couldn’t, suddenly couldn’t see … especially in terms of the people in my life, my family, my friends, the dog, the cats I had.”
In the years that followed, she adjusted to unsighted life: navigating her apartment by touch, using a cane on the street, accessing the web through vocal and audio tools.
She met her current partner Phil, who is also blind, through the Canadian Institute for the Blind.
Rare procedure
Then, three years ago, she was offered a tantalizing opportunity. Her ophthalmologist told her she was a candidate for a rare surgery that could potentially restore her vision.
The concept isn’t for the faint of heart. The procedure — which Lane was one of the first three people in Canada to receive earlier this year — involves embedding one of the patient’s own teeth, modified with a telescopic lens, in their eye.
“At first it was it was a scary thought, the whole tooth-eye thing, and the length of time that it took to go through all that referral, examinations, tests and all that stuff, was lengthy,” she told Global News.
But the prospect was enticing, and Lane signed up.
Finally, in February she and two other patients went under the knife at Mount Saint Joseph Hospital in Vancouver, where ophthalmologist Dr. Greg Moloney and his team of oral surgeons for the first portion of the two-part surgery.
They were the first three people in Canada to ever receive the surgery.
“It’s a rare operation, not designed for most patients with blindness, but patients with a special type of blindness affecting both eyes,” Moloney, who had performed the procedure successfully in Australia before moving to Canada, told Global News in March.
“So for patients with severe corneal scarring at the front of their eye, but a completely healthy internal mechanism of their eye, this is one of the only operations that can sometimes be successful.”
In the first surgery, doctors remove the patient’s K9 tooth and implant it in their own cheek, where it stays for three months accumulating a covering of tissue that allows it to be later implanted in the eye.
At the end of May, Lane returned to the operating room where doctors did just that.
‘What a beautiful view’
Since May, Lane has been gradually recovering her sight.
“It wasn’t take off the bandages and oh my god, I can see, it was gradual,” she said.
“The light increased, shadows were bigger, silhouettes of people I could see more clearly — but no detail. And then it started to be things like, I could see a car.”
But after a slow start, Lane said her ability to see began recovering more quickly.
One of the more memorable experiences was a recent visit to Dr. Moloney’s office tower on Broadway. It’s a place she’d visited a number of times, and always heard others remarking about the dramatic scene outside his north-facing windows.
This time, she was able to see what everyone was talking about.
“It was like, what a beautiful view, just to be able to see the blue sky and the water and the boats,” she said.
A more personal experience was when she began to see the features of Phil’s face.
“He still hasn’t seen me, and I had never seen him; when we met we were both blind,” she said. “We all have a picture of people in our heads, and then when you see that picture that’s kind of a, ‘Well, gee, that’s not at all what I thought’ or, yeah I kind of, you know, I had an idea. But that was an eye-opener.”
Lane said she’s now starting to be able to see people’s facial features when the light is good, along with colour and large text.
She’s hopeful that once she’s fitted for prescription glasses she’ll be able to read print too.
Seeing the faces of friends and family she hasn’t seen for years has been emotional, she added.
“And seeing the dog for the first time was a real, just joyful moment because I could see his tail wagging first,” she said.
“I can see him all now, and his eyes and his whole body and how his happy tail wags all the time.”
There are still challenges.
Lane said her peripheral vision is the strongest. That can sometimes play tricks on her mind, like when she’s a passenger in a vehicle and it feels like all the cars on the road are rushing right at her.
And she said she’s taking it one day at a time, not getting her hopes up that she’ll be able to drive or golf again — though she’s not ruling the possibility, and has started thinking about travel.
Now, in the final stages of a three-and-a-half-year journey, she said she’s glad she took the leap, and forever thankful to the medical team who made it a reality.
“I have said it to them, hugely surprised, grateful, emotional, you know, what a gift,” she said.
“It’s exciting … and I look forward to what else I’ll be able to see and do, I look forward to having more independence with my mobility.”