Day 1 of Making An Eye

Gracie had her first of two days meeting with the ocularist today in order to make her new eye. She was such a trooper! I was amazed at how well she did, and she was pretty proud of herself too. We took a few pictures to kind of chronicle the process.

Obviously her conformer had to be removed before he could start making a mold of her eye socket. Here is a picture of her without it in. It might not be as noticeable in the picture as in real life but her eye lids look much more sunken without the conformer in. That thing does an excellent job of giving the eye lids some shape.

I learned that there are a couple of different ways to make a mold of the eye socket. One commonly used is to inject a putty type stuff into the socket and let it harden. It's kind of like getting a mold of your teeth done. This is what they have video of on YouTube. Our ocularist feels that that method is quite traumatic on children, often they do this while they're still under anesthesia. He prefers to use a different method. It is much more pain staking as he makes a mold with wax by hand. He had to put it in and out of Gracie's eye at least 20 times to make sure he had it just right. It's his belief that you actually get a better fit with a child this way. Once he had the exterior mold done then he put some gel inside it and took a mold of the interior of the socket. The gel sat in her eye for about two minutes. When set it is the consistency of a boiled egg white. This was the part she liked the least as it feels pretty cold in the socket. But despite that she did her job well, she tolerated him playing with her eye for over two hours and the cold gel in her eye for two minutes. Way to go Gracie!!

Here's Gracie modeling the mold in her eye. She kept calling it her bubble gum eye as it's just the right colour so the sheet of wax really did look like a sheet of bubble gum. The hardest part of making an eye is getting a proper fit. He spent two hours making a mold and only about 30 minutes painting the iris (if that).

I thought that he painted the iris onto the eye itself. But no, the iris is a separate disc that he painted today and then inserts into the eye as it's being cast. So here is Gracie's iris being painted. Oh, in case any of you were wondering you are required to have a bachelor's degree preferably in the sciences in order to be accepted to apprentice to become an ocularist. Then the apprenticeship is 5 years of on the job training. And yes, I did ask permission before taking all these pictures of him working. He didn't mind a bit.

A close up of Gracie's iris. The iris is painted on a little round disk. The pupil is separate from that disk. It's a little suction cup looking thing with a black pupil in the center. The two (iris and pupil) are obviously joined together while the eye is being made, and the clear little handle which you see on the front of the eye is removed sometime during the process too. The black handle in the back is not attached to the iris, it's just there so he can handle it better.

The iris/pupil and Gracie. In the pictures it appears that the iris is a little too light to me. I didn't notice that until I got home. We'll have to see how it all turns out tomorrow. Tomorrow is when the sclera (white of the eye) gets painted and the final fitting gets done. AND we get to take home a new eye. Today was the hardest day by far for the process, or so we've been told, so tomorrow should be a piece of cake!