Olivia Xavier gets eye transplant after 10 years

A young girl in the UAE who had lost an eye has become the focus of a new film made by her parents to inspire patients with sight problems. Indian student Olivia Xavier, 12, lost her eye to a cancerous tumour when she was only two and now her life story has been told on tape. Her mother Nisha said: "The five-minute film on blindness will hopefully inspire others the way that Olivia has inspired everyone around her." It was not immediately clear where the film would be shown. Xavier recently received an artificial eye — essentially like a contact lens painted over a plastic eyeball — by specialists at Moorfields Eye Hospital in Dubai. It is said to be a "perfect match" to her healthy eye and even moves along with the natural eye. Paul Geelen, the ocularist based at Moorfields Eye Hospital Dubai, said: "Olivia came to the hospital for five short visits to allow us to create the perfect matching artificial eye. On each visit, Olivia would sit in front of me while I painted the artificial eye to correspond to her natural eye. Everyone at Moorfields is delighted with the results and the effect that it will have on Olivia and her family." This follows years of "stressful" cancer treatments and a range of unsatisfactory prostheses. "We were concerned about whether Olivia's eye condition was genetic and even adopted a second child rather than risk putting another child through the same trauma as Olivia had to undergo," Nisha said. But Xavier's courage changed the family's outlook and she now has blood siblings too. Xavier wants to be a film director and star A-list Bollywood celebrity Aishwarya Rai in a movie one day.