Nicki Guy, 47, a communications officer from the capital who lost her sight due to hypotony, a rare eye condition that causes dangerously low eye pressure, had her vision restored through a series of injections with a low-cost gel.
Ms Guy said: “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.”
The treatment, part of a project led by specialists at Moorfields Eye Hospital, uses hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC) – a gel commonly used in eye surgery to maintain the shape of the eye – in place of the traditional silicone oil.
While silicone oil can sometimes cause eye toxicity, specialists at Moorfields instead attempted treating people with injections of HPMC.
Ms Guy received injections every two weeks for a year as part of the programme, and was the first patient to receive the treatment.
She developed eye complications after being diagnosed with chronic anterior uveitis, an inflammatory condition, following the birth of her son.
After initially being symptom-free, she began to experience issues in 2017.
Describing her experience, she 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.”
Since 2019, she has been under the care of consultant ophthalmologist Harry Petrushkin at Moorfields.
Mr Petrushkin said: “When we started this she could just about see your hand waving in front of her eye.”
While Ms Guy’s left eye has improved significantly, she lost vision in her right eye last year due to retinal detachment.
Before this setback, she also received HPMC injections in that eye, which she described as effective.
Ms Guy’s only previous eye issue was short-sightedness, having worn glasses since age 11.
It was a routine eye test after her son’s birth that led to the discovery of her uveitis.
By 2017, a cataract had begun forming in her right eye.
At the time, she was living overseas in the Cayman Islands and was referred for treatment in Miami, where further problems were detected in her left eye.
Her doctor there, who had trained at Moorfields, referred her back to the UK for specialised care.
Ms Guy said: “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.”
The experience led her to change careers.
Ms Guy said: “I always wanted to work in communications, and I’ve never been able to make it happen.
“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?”
She expressed deep gratitude to Moorfields and Mr Petrushkin.
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.”
