Thanks to a medical team at the Eye Specialist Hospital in Al-Zahran, affiliated to Ministry of Health (MOH) in the Eastern Region, a 45-year old citizen can see his children for the first time in his life and after many years of blindness. The medical team has conducted a successful surgery of transplantation of artificial (or prosthetic) cornea and blue water drainage tube.
The MOH highlighted that the citizen has become able (after the surgery) to move without any assistance of his relatives and can lead his life independently. This type of surgery is in general to be performed on only one eye, but the outcome of the surgery on the first eye of this case was so encouraging that another surgery has been performed to the other one, thereby the patient can see well, may Allah be praised.
Within the same vein, the MOH underlined that the Eye Specialist Hospital in Al-Zahran is reckoned the only governmental hospital in the Eastern Region to conduct corneal transplant surgery on a regular basis. It is also reckoned one of the first hospitals across the Kingdom to conduct prosthetic corneal transplant surgery, which is one of the advanced surgeries in ophthalmology, being conducted to those patients with keratopathy and the attempts of transplanting natural cornea failed in their cases; due to specific factors led to the body's rejection to transplanted natural cornea.
It is worth mentioning that Eye Specialist Hospital in Dhahran has provided over the past six months its health services to more than 36,000 patients at its outpatient clinics and 8,512 patients at emergency section, in addition to 1,698 inpatients. During the same period, the number of patients referred to the hospital amounted to 3,254 cases and the number of operations conducted at the hospital amounted to 1,907 operations, including 478 corneal and front of the eye surgeries, 248 retinal detachment surgeries, 808 white water surgeries, 84 blue water surgeries, 135 pediatric operations, and 154 cosmetic eye surgeries.