Al-Shifa Doctors Save Three-Day-Old Infant in Rare Life-Saving Eye Surgery

RAWALPINDI: Three days old, and already fighting a tumour nearly a hundred times the weight of her own eye. That's the case doctors at Al-Shifa Trust Eye Hospital dealt with this week and, by their account, pulled off something rare in the process.

The infant came from a village in Jhelum district. She arrived at the hospital just three days after birth with a mass growing fast in one eye. Doctors ran an emergency assessment and didn't wait around the growth rate alone put her at risk, and surgery was the only real option on the table.

Al-Shifa Life-Saving Eye Surgery

Here's the number that stands out: a newborn's eyeball normally weighs about three grams. The tumour surgeons took out of this one weighed 285 grams. Ninety-five times over.

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A four-member team handled the procedure Dr Tayyab Afghani, Dr Faizan Tahir, Dr Ali Raza Syed and Dr Aiman, with anaesthetists and nursing staff alongside them. Given how far the disease had progressed, they removed the affected eye entirely. That was the only way to get the whole tumour out and keep the infant alive.

Hospital officials are calling it the first documented case in Pakistan of a congenital eye tumour this size treated successfully in an infant this young.

Rare Congenital Eye Tumour

Dr Afghani, the consultant ophthalmologist who led the case, said the surgery went well and the baby is recovering under close watch, her condition now stable. He said the team is satisfied with how she's progressing.

Congenital eye tumours in newborns don't come up often, but when they do, they move fast. Retinoblastoma the most common childhood eye cancer shows up in roughly one out of every 15,000 to 20,000 live births worldwide, per published clinical data. Catch it early and survival runs above 95 percent in well-resourced health systems. Catch it late, and the numbers drop hard, particularly across South Asia and other regions where referral to specialist care tends to lag.

That's exactly the point Afghani pressed on. He credited the parents for not sitting on it they brought the baby in immediately, and that timing, he said, is what let doctors get ahead of the disease before it spread further. He's now telling other parents the same thing: an unusually large eye, swelling that won't go down, anything that looks off in a newborn's eye get it checked right away, don't wait for the next scheduled visit.

The baby stays under regular follow-up while she heals. Once that's done, the hospital plans to fit her with a custom artificial eye, built to support normal facial growth and give her a typical appearance as she develops.

Al-Shifa Trust's read on the case: paediatric eye care in Pakistan needs faster referral pathways, full stop. A tumour like this one doesn't stay manageable for long. In the first days of a newborn's life, that window closes quickly.