Dad at risk of losing sight as eyelid swelled to ‘size of cherry tomato’ after devastating diagnosis

A father-of-three found himself at risk of losing his eyesight after a cancerous tumour on his eyelid swelled to “the size of a cherry tomato”, taking over his whole eye and weighing it shut.

Brett Exton, 55, who lives in Bridgend, Wales, noticed a small lump on his right eyelid just before flying out to Mexico for a family holiday in August last year, but he believed it was just a pimple or a stye – a round, slightly red lump on the upper lid by the eyelashes. The IT database manager said it was “almost insignificant”, but as the days progressed, the lump “started getting bigger and bigger and bigger”.

He visited a hospital in Mexico, where doctors drained the lump and glued the wound back together. Back home the lump continued to grow and, after he was unable to get an appointment at his regular opticians, he went into Specsavers where the team saw him immediately and referred him to the Princess of Wales Hospital the same day.

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Brett was later diagnosed with cancer and underwent four operations, and while he is now living with some “debilitating” side-effects and struggles with depression, he said he feels incredibly lucky that the cancerous tumour was diagnosed and removed so promptly.

“I’m grateful to Specsavers and I’m very grateful to the NHS,” he said. “The treatment that I had from the NHS, it’s all free – it’s a marvellous thing that probably saved my life.”

“(The doctor in Mexico) only glued the slit that she’d made, she’d used liquid glue, but because it was still going up, because it was still swelling, it literally then just tore through that; it just tore that open and carried on