When one eye does not close completely because of paralysis of one half of the face, or facial palsy, what are the options available? I’m Doctor Priti Udhay, an ocular plastic surgeon from DRR Face Aesthetics, Chennai, and we are going to discuss this today.
So when one eye does not close completely because it is open for a long time, it can get dry, it can get infected and sometimes the vision can be compromised. Most of the cases, most of the situations this gets corrected by itself, all you need to do is put lubricating eye drops, and also patch the eye at nights, but the patching technique should be correct and you must ask your oculoplastic doctor to explain to you how to patch your eye at night. But in a few cases, when the eye persistently is open, and there is a risk of loss of vision in that eye, you need oculoplatic surgery to correct the eye closure.
Now what are the options available? What we do is, we put gold weight inside the upper eyelid, so that the eyelid is able to then close over the eyeball very well. Now this gold weight is inert, it does not cause any reaction and it helps in blinking and normal eye closure, the eye looks normal after the surgery.
Sometimes we need to lift the lower eyelid in order to close the eye, for that we use lining from inside the mouth which is called hard palate graft, and we correct the eye closure.
So there are various options available in oculoplastic surgery to help close the eye, and the eye looks normal and also functions normally. Here are a few pictures of our patients who have undergone this surgery.