This is the image of a man’s blind right eye, which was destroyed by firecrackers when he was nine and has now been repaired after medics removed shrapnel from it – 27 years later.

The now 36-year-old man, who has not been named, came asking for doctors’ help at the Shenzhen University General Hospital, in the city of Shenzhen, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, in December 2021.

The man had suffered an eye injury from firecrackers when he was nine years old, and at that time, the medical facilities in his hometown were limited, so he did not receive proper treatment.

His vision went from bad to worse, and he found that his pupil had turned white, leaving him only able to see with his left eye.

At the same time, the man noticed the damaged eye had started to point in a different direction (known as exotropia), making him embarrassed when speaking to others.

He told local media: “After going to work, I used a lot of computers and mobile phones…so I thought about whether there was a chance to recover my sight.”

Dr Cai Li from the Shenzhen University General Hospital, who performed the surgery, said: “Normal pupils should be transparent, his pupil was completely white and was not round, the iris had adhered to the lens, you could also not see the inside of his eye from the outside, and he could not see the outside world from the inside.”

Doctors found that the man had developed a traumatic cataract in his right eye, posterior synechia (when the iris adheres to the lens), and exotropia (from disuse).

They removed the cataract through surgery, to restore the appearance of the pupil. During the operation, two pieces of shrapnel with diameters of one millimetre were found. The medics said they were likely small fragments that had entered the eye 27 years ago from the firecracker.

As a result of the surgery, the visual acuity of the man’s right eye was brought to 0.6.

And when he was re-examined three months later, the corrected visual acuity of his right eye had reached 0.8, and he also now had a normal appearance, after his eye had been trained to once again look in the right direction.