Matching prosthetic eye lights up the face of wounded Iraqi boy
Friday, April 7th, 2006Peering around a corner of the small waiting room yesterday, Abdul Hakeem Ismael Khalaf Hussein flashed a set of virtually identical brown eyes — one of them not even minutes old — at several cameras, causing one woman to well up with tears of joy.
The 7-year-old Iraqi boy broke a smile, blinked and made brief eye contact with Maria Roberts, who was trying unsuccessfully to mask her emotions.
Almost seven hours after Abdul Hakeem walked into ocularist Walter Tillman’s Downtown office, his lone dark brown eye, which once stood in contrast to a pale, opaque and unseeing eyeball on the left side of his scarred face, had been joined with a brown acrylic prosthesis that was flushing life back into the child’s face. (more…)