Enucleation
Enucleation is removal of the eye. It is
a form of treatment that allows your eye-cancer specialist to remove your tumor
from your body. Unfortunately, patients also lose the vision from that eye. With
time, almost all patients are able to do all the things they used to do before
losing their eye.
Enucleation is most commonly used to remove large-sized tumors of the eye. This
is because the amount of radiation required to kill a tumor which fills most of
the eye is just too much for the eye to stand. Within months to years, many
patients who are treated with radiation for large ocular melanomas lose vision,
develop glaucoma, or have their eye removed anyway.
This is a patient (looking left) who has completed
cosmetic rehabilitation
after Enucleation surgery. Notice that he looks normal but the
prosthetic eye does not move as well as a normal eye.
If you are young and/or healthy you may want to have your surgery as an
out-patient. Most patients stay in the hospital for at least one night after
surgery. Since your surgery will be performed under general anesthesia, you will
not feel or see anything until you wake up. Ask your eye-cancer specialist to
give extra local anesthesia at the end of your surgery. Then you will have the
least pain possible when you wake up in the recovery room. Most patients have a
headache for 24-36 hours after surgery which goes away with two regular Tylenol
every 4 hours.
Many patients are concerned that the loss of the eye may hurt. But the eye is
surrounded by bones, therefore it is much easier to tolerate removal of an eye
as compared to loss of a lung or kidney.
Within 2 to 6 weeks of surgery you will be sent for a temporary ocular
prosthesis (plastic-eye). Besides the swelling and the “black-eye,” you will
look fairly normal. After a final prosthetic fitting 90% of our patients are
happy with the way they look, and 80% say others can’t even tell they are
monocular. It will take some time to adjust to using one eye, but most patients
learn to compensate during the first year after surgery.