A 2.5-Year Journey of Fate, Faith, and Cornea Transplants

I struggled to sleep on the flight, only catching an hour here and there. After waking up from one of those brief sleeps, my left eye felt incredibly sore and dry. My vision was quite blurred.

As soon as I landed in London and cleared customs, I took the lenses out and put my glasses on for the two-hour train ride home. But over the next two days, my left eye got progressively worse. It became bright red, excruciatingly painful, and the eyelid began to swell shut.

The Diagnosis: A Blind Spot in the UK

Unable to get an appointment with my local GP, I took myself to the local hospital’s Accident & Emergency department.

Within minutes of being seen, it became pretty clear—pardon the pun—that I had a severe infection. Following tests and X-rays, the doctor delivered a heavy blow: I had two large ulcers over my cornea, which was causing the massive swelling and vision loss.

I was prescribed three different types of eye drops to be taken every single hour around the clock, staggered so they weren't taken at the same time. The hospital staff told me that if I promised to do this religiously, I could go home; otherwise, they would admit me to the ward to do it themselves.

I went home and set my alarm to wake me up every hour of the night. When I returned for a check-up two days later, my eyesight had deteriorated even further. During an eye test, I unbelievably couldn't even see the nurse standing in front of me, let alone read the letters on the screening board.

After ten days of hourly drops and near-total sleep deprivation, I was utterly exhausted. The doctors agreed to ease the schedule to every two hours, noting that my body desperately needed sleep and energy to fight the infection. A few days later, it was reduced to every four hours.

After five long weeks, the infection was finally gone. But it left behind severe, permanent scarring across my cornea. Trying to see out of my left eye was now like trying to look through a steamed-up bathroom mirror. I had lost 90% of the vision in that eye, and glasses couldn't fix it.

The Emotional Rollercoaster: NHS vs. Private Care

This news was devastating. At the time, I worked as a self-employed table tennis coach. I had cancelled all my work during the infection, and returning to the table with no depth perception was incredibly difficult. I eventually went back to initially coaching school groups and juniors, but I didn't feel right training advanced players when I couldn't see properly.

The specialist told me the only way I would ever see clearly again was through a cornea transplant. With nothing left to lose, I agreed to go on the NHS waiting list, which had an estimated six-month wait.

A year passed with no news. When I contacted the hospital, they told me I was near the top of the list, but emergency cases would always take priority for donated eyes.

Fifteen months into my wait, with no surgery date in sight, I started looking into private options. A private clinic in London offered a favorable treatment plan and quoted me £6,000 for the operation, with a wait time of just four to six weeks.

I paid £350 for an initial consultation and travelled to London. They confirmed I was an ideal candidate for a Superficial Anterior Lamellar Keratoplasty (SALK)—a less invasive transplant that replaces only the outer layer of the cornea. Because it was less invasive, the stitches could be removed in just three months.

This was massive news. In the months since my infection, I had decided to take early retirement and move to Vietnam. The only thing holding me back was this eye operation. I paid the money, booked my trains and hotels, and a surgery date was set for the middle of December.

Then, life took an unbelievable twist of fate.

A Shocking Double-Cancellation

The very day before I was due to catch the train to London for private surgery, my local NHS eye hospital called. After 16 months of silence, I had finally hit the top of the NHS list. They offered me a free operation the first week of January at a hospital just 10 minutes from my house.

They gave me one hour to decide. If I turned them down, the slot and the donated eye would go to the next person on the list.

It was an agonizing choice, but after alot of soul searching I chose to stick with my private London clinic plan because I already had my follow-up care mapped out around my upcoming move to Hanoi in April 2025 and had paid the money!!!  With a racing heart, I called the NHS back and turned down the slot.

An hour later, I pulled my car over on the way to my the table tennis club to answer a call from the private London clinic. They were cancelling my surgery. They had been offered six donated eyes, but none met the quality standards required for my specific procedure. My world collapsed. Less than an hour prior, I had willfully passed on a free NHS operation, and now my £6,000 private backup was gone.

The London clinic suggested I call the NHS hospital back immediately to see if the eye and avaialble slot was still available, promising a full £6,000 refund if the NHS took me back.

I tried phoning the local hospital, but the line was constantly engaged. In a panic, I parked my car and prepared to walk straight into the hospital reception. Just as I stepped out of the vehicle, someone answered.

With the biggest sigh of relief of my entire life, the Nurse coordinator told me I was incredibly lucky: she hadn't offered the eye to the next person yet. The date was locked in for Monday, January 13, 2025.

But the roller coaster wasn't finished. I suddenly realized that January 13 was the exact day I was flying back from a final two-week scouting trip to Hanoi! In all the emotional upheaval, I had completely forgotten my holiday dates. Trembling, I called them back. Thankfully, they understood and pushed the surgery to the very next morning.

The London clinic kept their word, and a full £6,000 refund landed in my account within a week.

The Transplant

I arrived home from Hanoi at 4:00 PM on Monday, January 13. At 8:00 AM the next morning, I checked into my local UK hospital.

Because I was awake for the first part of the operation, it was highly uncomfortable. The surgeons used a laser to cut and remove the damaged layers of my cornea. They used numbing drops that blacked out my left eye, leaving me to lie there with my good eye open, listening to the laser work on my eyeball for ten minutes that felt like hours.

After that, I was wheeled into a second theater, put under general anesthetic, and the new donor cornea was stitched into place.

The surgeons were pleased with the result, but there was a catch. The NHS team had to perform a deeper transplant (Deep Anterior Lamellar Keratoplasty or DALK) than the private clinic had planned. This meant the stitches had to remain in my eye for at least a year, completely derailing my April move to Vietnam.

When I told my surgeon that this threw a wrench into my retirement plans, fate intervened once more. He told me he had shared a room with a Vietnamese eye doctor at medical school. He promised to reach out to him to find a trusted specialist in Hanoi who could handle my bi-monthly checkups and eventually possibly remove the stitchess

By February, he handed me a name. Out of all the doctors and cities in Vietnam, his contact worked at a private eye hospital right in the heart of Hanoi.

With a specialist lined up, my retirement was back on track. I moved to Hanoi in April 2025.

World-Class Care for the Price of a Pint

After two months in Hanoi, I emailed the recommended specialist on a Thursday afternoon. They replied that very same day and booked me in for the following Tuesday morning.

The hospital was spotless, modern, and highly efficient. When a small language barrier popped up at reception, they quickly brought over an English-speaking staff member to assist me.

The cost for my initial consultation, eye tests, and scans? Just 300,000 VND—about £10. My specialist, Dr. Chi, spoke fluent English. Her team was professional, kind, and exceptionally thorough. Everything was fine, the graft was healing well. She prescribed two types of eye drops—a mild steroid to prevent transplant rejection and a protective drop to combat Hanoi’s city air pollution. A two-month supply of both cost me just £10.

In January 2026, a full year after my transplant, Dr. Chi decided it was time to remove the 16 stitches. Rather than booking an expensive flight back to the UK and waiting for an NHS slot, I trusted her to do it in Hanoi.

The procedure cost 250,000 VND—roughly £7. While I sat in the waiting room, she popped out to apply numbing drops. An hour later, I was in her chair. While I was wide awake, she systematically removed all 16 stitches over 30 minutes. There was a slight tugging sensation, but it wasn't painful at all—and it was a luxury compared to the laser surgery in the UK.

A week later, my follow-up check confirmed that the graft had healed beautifully and my vision should start to stablise.

Coming to Terms

Disappointingly, despite the successful transplant and the removal of the stitches, my clear vision never fully returned. The original ulcer infection had altered the shape of my eye too severely.  Dr. Chi later tried fitting me for large scleral lenses to smooth out the surface, but they unfortunately didn't work either.  Sadly ordinary glasses would not improve my vision either.

I received the news I was half prepared for: I will never see clearly out of my left eye again.

This two-and-a-half-year medical saga started on a flight out of Vietnam and ultimately resolved itself inside a clinic in Hanoi nearly two an half years later.

While it isn’t the perfect "eureka" ending I had initially hoped for, my vision is significantly better than it was before the transplant, when I was virtually blind during the infection, but still everything is out of focus and blurred. I have adapted to the change, and my right eye does the heavy lifting while my left eye acts as a passenger.

I am incredibly grateful for the care I received along the way. Huge thanks go to Dr. Loomba in Hull, UK, who performed the initial transplant, and to Dr. Chi and her wonderful team at the Bệnh viện Mắt 2 in Hanoi for their world-class, affordable continuation of care.

Moving abroad over 60 comes with massive health questions, but this experience taught me that world-class medical support is waiting for you on the other side of the world.

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