Nicki Guy, 47, says a “phenomenal” bout of pioneering treatment has restored her vision after suffering from hypotony – or low eye pressure – which forced to give up driving
A miracle jab has restored a woman’s sight after specialists “pumped-up” her eye with gel.
Nicki Guy, 47, lost her vision after suffering from hypotony – or low eye pressure – and was even forced to give up driving. But now she says a “phenomenal” bout of pioneering treatment has cured her and she’ll be able to get behind the wheel again and take her son skiing.
She was the first patient to have her eye injected with a low-cost gel used in most surgeries, as part of a project led by experts at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London.
Nicki said: “With hypotony, your eye basically crumples like a paper bag. This is the really annoying thing – I’ve got really good vision behind the folds that cause the lack of vision.
A lot of patients perhaps won’t have that, but the signal between my optic nerve and my brain, it’s there. The vision is there. It was just this collapse of the structure.”
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Nicki, a communications officer for sight loss charity Thomas Pocklington Trust, has been undergoing treatment since May 2019.
She started having eye issues shortly after the birth of her son when she was diagnosed with chronic anterior uveitis, which causes inflammation at the front of the eye.
The rare condition leads to redness, pain, sensitivity to light and blurred vision. She was symptom-free until she started to develop complications in 2017.
The condition is usually treated with injections of silicone oil to boost eye pressure.
But specialists at Moorfields said this can cause toxicity to the eye and instead attempted treating people with injections of HPMC – hydroxypropyl methylcellulose.
The clear and colourless gel is usually used in surgery to maintain the eye’s shape during operations, or to coat its surface for protection and prevent it from drying out.
Nicki, from London, was one of eight patients to have injections every two weeks for a year.
She said: “There’s none of that murkiness, the pressure is there.” Consultant ophthalmologist Harry Petrushkin at Moorfields described the eyesight of the eight patients as “poor” before the project.
Speaking about Nicki, he said: “When we started this she could just about see your hand waving in front of her eye.”
Nicki – who had to surrender her driving licence in 2021 due to her condition – now hopes to get behind the wheel again.
“I’m so close to being able to drive again with my vision in my left eye. So I mean, that’s phenomenal success. If it stays like this for the rest of my life, I would just be exceedingly happy.
“I’ve been able to take my son skiing. I love taking photographs, so I can do that again.
“But there’s still challenges, don’t get me wrong. There are still challenges with my vision as it is, but from where I was, it’s just phenomenal.”
While vision in Nicki’s left eye has been restored, she has lost sight in her right eye after suffering retinal detachment, a serious condition where the retina pulls away from the back of the eye, last year.
Before this, she had HPMC injections in the right eye, which she said were successful.
Nicki had had “no issues” with her eyes apart from wearing glasses from the age of 11.
A routine eye test after the birth of her son detected problems and she was eventually diagnosed with chronic anterior uveitis, which was symptomless.
In early 2017, doctors detected the early onset of a cataract – which causes the lens of the eye to become cloudy – in Nicki’s right eye, but she was told “everything looked fine” and went ahead with plans to move overseas with her family.
In the following years she was monitored by medics in the Cayman Islands, but was eventually sent to Miami for treatment, where doctors raised concerns about a cataract in her left eye.
“My doctor had actually done her fellowship at Moorfields,” Nicki said. “She had a lot of contacts there.
So she referred me back to Moorfields, and we came home.” She said it has been “challenging”, but added: “I think I maybe let myself wallow for maybe a day, half a day.
“I couldn’t let myself and I wouldn’t let myself dwell on it, that it wasn’t going to be OK.
“And I’ve always said that whilst there’s hope, whilst there’s fight, I will do that.
“I won’t entertain the negative. But, day to day, it was hard. Simple things like ironing.
“I’ve got quite a few burn marks. You do feel like you lose some of your independence in those early days, because you’re just plunged into this whole new world that you weren’t expecting.”
Before the treatment, Nicki did “bits and bobs of everything” for work but the experience “pushed” her to a new career.
“I always wanted to work in communications, and I’ve never been able to make it happen,” she said.
“And actually it did lead me to TPT (Thomas Pocklington Trust), my current company.
“The fact that it’s a sightless charity – you know when something just feels like it aligns so perfectly?”
Nicki said she is “enormously grateful” to Mr Petrushkin and Moorfields. “When I was going through all of this, in the beginning, this wasn’t an option,” she said.
“I know that they’ve now rolled this out to other patients in the clinic who have also had quite a lot of success with it.
“I just think that is amazing. Knowing that other people have benefited from what was a quite a challenging, quite scary time in my life, it just brings an extra layer to it.”
