A microsurgeon educated at LSU New Orleans Medical School recently performed a first-ever surgery by reattaching a woman’s eyelid and reconnecting its tiny blood vessels.
Dr. Kamran Khoobehi performed the surgery at West Jefferson Medical Center in Marrero on April 3 just hours after Alyssa Kieff’s beagle bit off her right eyelid.
After a thorough investigation, Leslie Capo, the LSU Health Sciences Center spokeswoman, said the six-hour procedure was apparently the first of its kind.
“We checked worldwide medical literature for microsurgical procedures involving eyelid surgery, and we didn’t find any where the blood vessels were reconnected,” Capo said.
To add to the legitimacy of calling the operation “first-ever,” Capo contacted Dr. Harry Buncke, who is known in the medical community as the “father of microsurgery.”
“He said it was a medical first,” Capo said.
Although eyelids have been reattached before, Khoobehi is the first doctor to reconnect the tiny blood vessels of a detached eyelid.
Khoobehi said 50 to 60 percent of the eyelid tissue would be lost without blood circulation, but he expects Kieff to be 95 percent of what she was before.
The eyelid was bitten off when Kieff was trying to put her beagle, Bailey, into his cage.
“He’d been acting kind of weird that day,” Kieff said. “I was going shopping and needed to put him in his cage. I was fussing at him because he was giving me problems.”
Kieff said when Bailey snapped at her, she instinctively drew back, minus her right eyelid.
With her husband out fishing, Kieff managed to stay calm and called her mother in Dallas, who told her to put the lid on ice.
She then waited an hour for an ambulance to arrive.
“My eye didn’t really hurt,” Kieff said. “I had two puncture wounds on my cheek that I felt much more.”
Khoobehi had never performed an eyelid reattachement operation before and was daunted when he learned of the operation he had to perform.
Khoobehi went ahead with the surgery at the urging of Kieff’s family.
Khoobehi said the surgery was not easy because the eyelid’s blood vessels are too small for conventional microsurgery instruments, which must hold the vessel in order for a needle to be inserted to reconnect it.
To rectify the problem, Khoobehi used a steady flow of saline solution to hold the vessels open and preventing them from collapsing.
“I was able to help my patient against all odds, and I knew well that if the surgery wasn’t successful, in all probability, she would have lost her eye,” Khoobehi said in a press release.
After the surgery, doctors kept medicinal leeches on Kieff’s face for four days to improve circulation in the area until the reconnected blood vessels could work on their own.
“It was pretty gross,” Kieff said. “Once they were on, I didn’t really notice them. But, when they took them off, I could feel them squirming.”
Kieff recently returned to work and said the eye is still shut.
“I have to stare at a computer screen with one eye, so I get a headache,” she said.