By Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Kelly E. Barnes

USNS Comfort Public Affairs

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (NNS) -- A unique operation to remove debris from behind the eye of a 22-year-old patient was conducted aboard hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20) Sept. 6, while anchored off the coast of Port-au-Prince.

Cmdr. Octavio Borges, an ophthalmologist attached to Comfort, received Ferjuste Philomenon as a patient referred by an optometrist who reviewed Philomenon at one of Comfort’s treatment sites ashore.

Philomenon complained of a splinter behind his eye from being hit with a broom stick one year ago, according to Borges.

As it appeared, the wound near Philomenon’s eye drained fluids but he could still see and his eye functioned normally. It was not until Borges’ physical inspection of the eye that he decided on a CT scan.

“I felt what’s called a ‘step off’ – a broken bone,” Borges said. “The CT scan showed fractures and a foreign body in the cheek bone.”

Even after hearing Philomenon’s description of his wound, the CT scan showed a great surprise for both Borges and Lt. Cmdr. John Conery, the radiologist who conducted and reviewed the scan.

“He (Borges) wanted to get the CT scan to see how deep the splinter went,” Conery said. “He had no idea how big it actually was.”

The fragments of wood were about four centimeters long. The operation to remove the splinter was a combined effort between Borges and Comfort’s ear, nose and throat doctor, Lt. Cmdr. Angela Powell.

Fragments of wooden splinters were not the only dangers to Philomenon’s eye – he also had a hole in the bottom of his eye socket that the wood had struck through.

“If there’s a hole in the bottom of the orbit, the contents, his eye, would fall down,” Conery said.

Borges and Powell removed about 10 splinters from Philomenon’s eye through a hole Powell created in his cheek bone. With the bone removed from Philomenon’s cheek, Powell and Borges closed the hole in the bottom of his eye.

“We rebuilt the floor of the eye socket with his bone and strips of metal,” Borges said.

The metal arched up to support the new repair to Philomenon’s eye socket.

“This was something that needed to be done,” Borges continued. “The danger of leaving the wood in is that it’s an organic matter – it stimulates inflammation and it brought in bacteria and fungal elements.”

Borges said by conducting the operation on Philomenon, he and Powell have saved him from a possible infection that could have potentially killed him.

Comfort is on a four-month humanitarian deployment to Latin America and the Caribbean providing medical care to patients in a dozen countries.

For more news from USNS Comfort, visit www.news.navy.mil/local/tah20/.