Well, this is disgusting. Wildly impressive, ingenious, creative, miraculous, even, but also gross. Doctors in Canada used a blind man’s tooth to replace his eyes to restore his sight, marking the first time this procedure has been performed in Canada.

A Canadian from North Vancouver, 33-year-old Brent Chapman, recently underwent a procedure called osteo-odonto keratoprosthesis, or an OOKP for short. In colloquial terms, it’s the “tooth-in-eye surgery.”

It’s a very rare and complex surgical procedure that, honestly, sounds like someone is just making up a surgery as they go. Yet it works; it can restore eyesight to the blind.

Canadian Doctors Implanted A Patient’s Tooth In His Eye To Restore His Vision

Chapman was a little apprehensive at first. As anyone would be when posed with the option of having a tooth surgically implanted in their eye as a means of returning vision—like that makes any sense.

After hearing that, for as insane as it sounds, the procedure has a successful track record, he started to warm up to it. He went all in when he spoke to an Australian woman who had been blind for 20 years until she had the surgery and, according to Chapman, “now she is skiing.”

It’s easy to see why this conversation swayed him. Chapman went blind in both eyes after he had a severe autoimmune reaction to ibuprofen when he was 13. The procedure is seen as a last-ditch effort for people like Chapman, who have severe corneal blindness in the front of the eyes caused by conjunctival scarring, but whose retinas and optic nerves are still healthy in the back of the eye.

The surgery is actually two surgeries that happen several months apart. Chapman just completed the first one. He and two other Canadian patients who recently underwent this procedure will get the second stage of it completed later in the year.

Okay, so with all that established, here’s how the miracle of modern medicine enables surgeons to use a tooth to make a person see again: in the first surgery, the surgeons will remove the patient’s tooth and shave it down into a little rectangle.

They’ll then drill a hole into it so they can slide in a little plastic optical lens, kind of like the lens on a pair of glasses but only about as wide as a pencil eraser. The tooth is implanted under the skin of the cheek to grow new tissue, then later, in the second surgery, it’s transferred into the eye.

The patient is left with a mock eyeball that is rosy pink with a big black dot in the center that acts as a pupil. That black dot is where the lens calls home and it’s that little lens that enables a previously blind person to see again. It’s kind of like having your glasses surgically merged with your head.

As with any surgical procedure, there are risks, but the surgery has been performed for several decades now across 10 countries and it has a fairly high success rate. A 2022 study centered around the procedure found that 94 percent of the patients who underwent the surgery could still see 27 years later.

This isn’t the first procedure Chapman has undergone to restore his sight. Over 20 years he’s undergone 50 surgeries, including 10 corneal implants. Some restored his sight for a brief period before fading away again.

One of them gave him the ability to see again for two years before the effects faded. Let’s hope OOKP is the last surgery he’ll need.