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Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Give me a ring.With hindsight, I think we should have had the nose ring fitted a little higher up.

And on the subject of extreme body-piercing, I spent this morning at the Sussex Eye Hospital, sitting in on a few fluorescein angiographs. There was a sign on the wall saying that it proves fatal approximately once every 220,000 times, so I left after half a dozen patients before my luck ran out.

It was all very interesting, but not as jaw-dropping as the patient I met who was preparing for a bit of Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis. No, really. Having had the procedure explained to me, I had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn't April the 1st.

If you want to try this at home, you'll need a blind man, a pair of pliers and a drill, but to be honest, it's probably best left to the professionals. Apparently they (by which I mean the handful of people who perform this miracle, one of whom does it about two hundred yards from my flat) removes a tooth from the patient, hollows it out a bit, then implants it into their cheek. I know, I didn't believe it either. The patient then walks around with a molar in their face for a few months (like that mouse with an ear on its back), until the tooth grows its own blood supply. It's like The Terminator, only more gruesome.

That done, the bloody tooth is then removed from the cheek and inserted into the patient's eye. No, seriously. The blind man looks through the hollowed out tooth, and their vision is restored. As the meerkats would say, "Simples!". So if anyone says they'd give their eye teeth to be able to see again, they can do it on the NHS in Brighton.

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