Doctors Make Adorable 3-Year-Old Girl New Eye Socket from Stomach Fat
Have you ever stopped to think how many of the world’s proverbs and sayings touch upon the human eye? After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the eyes are a window to the soul, and it isn’t good to be wise in your own eyes.
Blindness features prominently too, because we all know that love is blind, there is no one as blind as he who will not see, and even a blind hog occasionally picks up an acorn. But to truly understand the importance of eyes, I think it might do us good to mull over the case of 3-year-old Myah Hauxwell.
Glance at a snapshot of Myah, and you might the little blonde girl from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, England, was simply pretty as a picture. You might not even notice the way in which she scrunches her right eye shut.
That perpetual squint isn’t some momentary blink, though. Myah was born with microphthalmia.
According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Genetics Home Reference, microphthalmia is a rare gene disorder that affects one out of every 10,000 births and means that one eye is smaller than the other.
The disorder can also cause blindness in some cases since actual essential tissue is occasionally missing. That’s what had happened with Myah.
“As soon as I saw her for the first time, I knew something was wrong,” her mother, Lauren Hauxwell, told Metro. “Her one eye was sunken into her face and didn’t appear to be working properly. …
“None of my scans during pregnancy showed that anything was wrong. I still loved her unconditionally, but I had no idea what the future held.”
Initially, that future involved a prosthesis that physicians fitted to the little girl’s face. But the weight of it proved too heavy over time, causing the structure of her face to sag and leading to repeated infections.
So doctors came up with another idea: They would fashion a new socket for Myah — out of her own stomach fat.
“As the socket is now her own fat tissue and is the size it’s supposed to be, Myah hopefully won’t need a new one created again,” Hauxwell said. “If we didn’t have this surgery …, Myah’s face would have drooped down on one side for the rest of her life and she would have been in daily pain.”
The innovative procedure did more than merely requisition part of Myah’s own body for a novel use. It also mimicked that size and thickness of an ordinary eye socket.
At a thickness of only a single millimeter, the new socket should put far less strain on the little girl’s face. What’s even better is that it should be permanent.
That doesn’t mean Myah is out of the proverbial woods, though. Hauxwell will need to raise £5,500 ($7,250 USD) for further treatment.
As of press time, a GoFundMe campaign had brought in £843 ($1,113 USD) of that goal. There’s still a ways to go, but Hauxwell is simply happy for her daughter’s cheerful determination.
“Myah just gets on with it,” she explained to the Mansfield Chad. “I don’t treat her any differently because it’s better that way.”
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