I lost my eye when I was 2½; my brother and I were playing with sticks when one accidently went into my eye. I lost my sight but the Specialist was able to reattach the retina in three places which meant my eye did not die. The operation was successful but I had years and years of trouble with infections and my eye pulling squint which made me very self conscious, I would not look at people when I talked to them and would also never call anyone because they would not know who I was looking at.

At the age of 22 my mum introduced me to a gentleman in Johannesburg who worked together with an ophthalmic surgeon in Pretoria. I underwent another major operation where they removed all the hardware that was holding my eye together. At that time I had the choice of getting a coral implant or keeping my eye and getting a cosmetic lens, just from the pure pain factor I opted for the lens.

After getting many moulds made and my colour repainted a number of times, I have a difficult colour to paint, I got my first lens. I was over the moon and felt like I had a new lease on life. Over the years my socket became more and more sunken making it necessary to get new lenses made.

My family and I immigrated to Australia in 2001, I visited Ocularists over here but was not happy with their work and I needed to get a new eye fitted as my socket was looking very sunken. My mum did some investigations in Cape Town and heard about Vida, who had the reputation of painting the best colours. She made an appointment for me and I booked my ticket back. Vida and Danie were absolutely fantastic I had a limited time schedule and what we thought would just be an easy fit turned out to be a very difficult eye to make. The angle of the pupil of my original eye pulls out to the left, which means that to get the direction of gaze of the prosthesis correct is very difficult. The fact that my eye socket had also sunken so badly made it even more difficult as the prosthesis had to be built up in certain places to fill out the socket but that in turn caused my eye lid to not sit correctly.

Vida painted my colour which was absolutely magnificent, the iris even had depth to it, it was amazing but we battled and battled to get the shape and direction of gaze correct. Danie and Vida came up with different ideas and never gave up, they could so easily have said that they had done the best they could but they didn’t, they persevered and kept trying different things. My trip came to an end and I left with an eye I thought was perfect but once my eye settled down and relaxed after all it had been through with the models and fiddling the eyelid started sticking and became very uncomfortable.

I became incredibly disheartened as I was now back in Australia and how would they be able to fix it from the other side of the world. But they did it, Vida made me three new eyes from the mould that she had and incorporated adjustments we discussed on Skype. She sent me three eyes to try; hoping one would be good enough to wear while I sent her the eye she had made me with the beautiful colour so she could reset it with adjustments. A couple of weeks later I received the best eye I have ever had, I am confident to look at people, it has changed my life.

Danie and Vida are the most caring and wonderful people I have ever met, they went all out to make me the best eye possible and I am very grateful to them.