A 22-year-old Filipino woman has gone viral for demonstrating to others on camera how she puts in her artificial eye.
Gabo Adeva of Manila, in the Philippines, started seeing "squiggly, string-like floaters" in her right eye and experienced extreme headaches last September, but she did not think anything of it at the time, she told Viral Press.
It was not until earlier this year when her right eye almost completely blacked out, she said, that she started consulting with experts.
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"At that time, if you shined a light into my right eye, you could see that the color of my pupil was already fading," said Adeva.
"I was losing my peripheral vision on my right side. There were instances where I would bump into someone on my right because I couldn't see them."
She met with specialists who told her she was suffering from retinal detachment.
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"Retinal detachment describes an emergency situation in which a thin layer of tissue (the retina) at the back of the eye pulls away from its normal position … [separating] the retinal cells from the layer of blood vessels that provides oxygen and nourishment to the eye," according to the Mayo Clinic.
As Adeva continued meeting with ocular experts, they discovered something even more severe.
"My retina didn't detach on its own. There was something pushing it from behind. When we checked via ultrasound, we found that there was already a 13-millimeter tumor growing on my eye," said Adeva.
She was diagnosed with stage two eye cancer and was told she would need immediate surgery to prevent the mass from metastasizing, Viral Press reported.
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Dr. Gary Mercado, Adeva's ophthalmologist, said, "She had a choroidal melanoma half the size of her eye. It's a type of tumor that grows from the pigment cells in our eyes," as Viral Press also noted.
He added, "She didn't have any particular habits that caused it. It just happened."
Adeva decided to go through with the surgery. She asked her family, friends, and fans to pray for a successful surgery, Viral Press said.
The surgery itself took less than two hours in total.
After a few weeks of post-operative recovery, she returned to her ophthalmologist's office to be fitted for an artificial eye.
"I don't know what came over me, but I just laughed at myself when the doctor removed the bandage and I saw myself in the mirror," said Adeva.
"I didn't feel sad, I didn't cry, because I knew I could just get a prosthetic eye and it would look normal."
Adeva has been open about the illness with followers on social media.
After this major life change, she said her view about life has become clearer — and that she would not have been able to get through this without her support system.
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"I learned that your true friends will be there for you during the bad situations. They are the ones who truly matter," she told Viral Press.
She added, "Life wouldn't throw challenges at us that we couldn't deal with."
