Priceless!

We are back from Ty's latest appointment. This time we traveled to Nashville to meet with Ocularist, Sherry Richardson. She makes prosthetic eyes. Ty spent most of the summer without his eye in because the fit was just not that great, and it would cause him some discomfort and gooping of the eye. Ty's last prosthetic eye was in 2007. Needless to say, he has grown quite a bit in the past couple of years, and it was time for a whole new eye. I recorded the process the best I could with my camera. So I thought I would let you see how it works. First off, Sherry is so cool! Not only is she amazing at her job, but she has the patience of Job. Ty spent most of the time sitting on her lap while she formed, molded, and painted his "eye". It was so neat to watch. First off we have the before picture. You can see how the eye is closed completely, and very droopy. Also, Ty tried to show off the inside of his actual eye. This is what the real eye looks like. Notice how small the iris part is? You can hardly see it. It is actually the size of my pinky fingernail.

The next process was for Sherry to make the eye impression for the new prosthetic mold. If you have ever had an impression made in your mouth, it works very similar. She inserted a mold into Ty's eye with a tube on the outside. She then injected the impression liquid into the tube so that it would go into the mold in Ty's eye. This part was hard for him. It burned a bit, and it was cold. So we had some crying going on. I stopped taking pictures then. I just didn't feel right about it. It seemed kind of cold to take pictures of my baby in pain. Here are the ones that I got at the beginning of the process.

Once the impression was made it was time for the mold to be made out of wax. This was too cool. She used this mold to shape and form a custom fit eye for Ty. She used tools and an alcohol burner to smooth the wax so that there were no rough spots that could irritate Ty's real eye. This is her forming the wax with a little help from her assistant.

Ty was impressed that he had a yellow eye. He really wanted to make that his "new eye". The boy cracks me up. He was serious too. I can only imagine how the little wheels in his head were turning. He must have been thinking up some doozies to tell people why he had a yellow eye. He kept asking Sherry, "How come I can't just have that one". Too funny!

After the molding was finished it was time for the baking of the eye. The artificial eye is made from acryllic. Yes, the same stuff that artificial nails are made of. So the acryllic goes in the wax mode and in a couple of hours - TA DA!- a new eye is made. The next step is to paint the eye so that it looks exactly like Ty's other eye. This is cool. Ty sat on Sherry's lap so that she could really get a good look at him, and she painted it to match his other eye.

You can see all of the different colors she has. Ty was really set on having orange in his eye. That is his favorite color- GO VOLS! So she made a special orange dot at the top of the eye so that we would know which way to put the eye in. This satisfied him. The painting of the blood vessels was really neat. She took small red fibers that look like fuzz and distributed them across the eye. Then she smoothed it over with the acryllic. It smelled like a nail salon in there. After the painting was finished it was off to the oven to bake and then to polish the eye at the end. This process took about 1 hour. After that Sherry was able to put Ty's new scleral shell in. This is the finished product. His eye is usually swollen for a day from all of the poking and prodding. This was right after inserting the eye.

This is what he looks like now after wearing the eye for a couple of days.

Pretty impressive if I do say so myself. You wouldn't even know which was the artificial one.

We are so thankful to the Lord for Sherry's talents. She is able to make our sweet little boy have some confidence, and that is priceless. Well I hope you have enjoyed your lesson on scleral shells today. Until next time.....