Sad Story: Student blinded after surgery to change her eye colour
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A student from London was left temporarily blind after surgery to change the colour of her eyes.
Shenise Farrell travelled to Panama, in Central America, for the unregulated procedure to change her eye colour from dark brown to light brown.
She spent £8,000 on the operation but it went wrong and she was almost left permanently blind.
Ms Farrell decided in 2009 that she wanted to change the colour of her eyes and so she began researching surgical options.
Despite her family’s horror, she travelled to Panama to have a procedure which involved implanting coloured discs – like a contact lenses – into her eyes.
Ms Farrell told Channel 5’s Botched Up Bodies: ‘I was so determined to get the surgery nothing rang alarm bells for me – nothing obvious.
When Ms Farrell arrived at the clinic in Panama, she was told that she could not have the light brown implants as they were out of stock.
As a result, the surgeon informed her that she would be given blue implants instead.
Despite this not being her original intention, she decided to go ahead with the operation.
Ms Farrell says that during the procedure she screamed and the surgeon told her not to scream as it ‘could cause things to go wrong’.
To her huge shock, at the end of the 20 minute procedure, Ms Farrell realised she couldn’t see properly.
She says it was as though she was looking underwater but the surgeon told her not to worry and that for some patients it took up to two weeks for vision to return to normal.
However, by the time Ms Farrell returned to London her sight had deteriorated further.
She went to Charing Cross Hospital where she was unable even to read the biggest letter on the optician’s chart.
Doctors at the hospital had never seen anything like it so were temporarily at a loss as to how to help her.
Eventually, it was decided that the implants had to be removed.
Ms Farrell risked permanent blindness to go under the knife again.
This time, surgeons made an incision in her corneas to allow them to remove the implants.
Ms Farrell said: ‘When I woke up I saw black. I panicked. I thought if my vision goes, my life will be over.’
Dailymail.co.uk
ABOUT: Nana Kwesi Coomson
[email protected] An Entrepreneur, Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Communications Executive and Philanthropist. Editor-in-Chief of www.233times.com. A Senior Journalist with Ghanaian Chronicle Newspaper. An alumnus of Adisadel College where he read General Arts. His first degree is in Bachelor of Arts - Political Science (major) and History (minor) from the University of Ghana. He holds MSc in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Energy with Public Relations (PR) from the Robert Gordon University in the United Kingdom. He is a 2018 Mandela Washington Fellow who studied at Clark Atlanta University in USA on the Business and Entrepreneurship track.
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