When four-year-old Karthik said he could identify images with his right eye, his mother Meenakshi was overjoyed.
He was born with hypotropia of his right eye, a condition in which the eyelid remains shut and the eye does not move.
Meenakshi and her husband, Sakthivel, an army man currently posted in Jammu, took him to several doctors who prescribed ointments and medicines or told them that the condition would reverse itself as he grew older.
Karthik has not started school because of his condition.
“We took him to Agarwal Eye clinic in Krishnagiri and they referred him to Chennai,” recalled Ms. Meenakshi. At Dr. Agarwal Eye Hospital, paediatric ophthalmologist Manjula Jayakumar took charge of him. Normally such conditions are surgically corrected in two sittings done four months apart. Later, the patient is given therapy to train the eye to take up normal activities. For Karthik, The hospital decided to do the correction in one sitting.
“The usual practice is to weaken the inferior muscle (lying below the eye), allow it to heal before augmenting the superior muscles by transposing the two horizontal muscles. We took one horizontal muscle and transposed it to the weakened superior muscle. We sutured it to strengthen the superior muscles. This was done in one sitting. The patient is being given physiotherapy also,” Dr. Manjula said.
Ashvin Agarwal, executive director of Dr. Agarwal group of eye hospitals, said the hospital had taken it as a challenge as often patients do not return for the second surgery. “The procedure is under review for publication in the Journal of American Association for Paediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus as a new surgical procedure for monocular elevation deficiency,” he said.
Karthik underwent the surgery on August 15 and was subsequently corrected for squint (amblyopia) on September 10 at Dr. Agarwal Eye Hospital in Chennai. Paediatric ophthalmologist Manjula Jayakumar said he would be followed up and therapy continued till his eye regained normal function.
