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Ian Bonner of Dallas lost an eye to cancer when he was just 13 years old.
In those days, according to the 67-year-old, if you wanted to survive cancer, the doctor would just cut out the diseased area and give the patient an eye patch.
“I was a youngster … going into my teens, and I didn’t like it at all,” Bonner said.
In 1979, he found a doctor in Cleveland who made him a prosthetic eye that he wore for the next 40 years. At the time, prosthetics weren’t widely available, so it wasn’t as real-looking. In 2020, he discovered a new option from his ophthalmologist.
“He said, ‘Look, I’m going to make a referral. You need to go see Allison [Vest], because I think what Allison can do for you today is pretty dramatic,’” Bonner said.
What happened next changed Bonner’s life.
After just about five months of care at Vest’s Mosaic Prosthetics in McKinney, Bonner had a new silicone eye carefully created to replicate every detail of a real one. The eye fits the mold in his face to create a lifelike look.
Bonner’s case is the last episode in Body Parts, a new three-part series on the TLC network featuring Vest’s work. The series debuted April 6 and the final episode airs April 20. Beginning April 21, the episodes will be available on Discovery+.
Vest, 42, a clinical anaplastologist, has dedicated her 17-year career to helping people like Bonner. The hallway in her clinic on West Louisiana Street is lined with two maps showing where her patients live. One map is Texas; the other is the rest of the world.
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“By the time people get to us, they’re so excited,” Vest said. “They’re so happy. We’re kind of that happy icing on the cake.”
She creates anything from fingers to ears to eyes. Depending on the case, it can take Vest a few months to a year to fully develop a patient’s prosthetic.
Vest, originally from southern Florida, graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a master’s degree in biomedical visualization. She received clinical training at the University of Florida’s dental school and the Morriston Hospital in Swansea, Wales.
When she was 26, she moved to Dallas to work at a private practice with one of her mentors. Eventually, she met her husband, Bryan, and they’ve since had two children.
Susan Habakuk, a former professor of Vest’s at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said Vest was the type of student who made her job easy as a professor. The two still converse, now as colleagues, about patient cases they have found. Habakuk has been in the field for over 40 years.
“She’s very comfortable, but professional at the same time,” Habakuk said. “That doesn’t always happen.”
Vest and two others — an insurance specialist and a receptionist — form the team that sees 60 to 80 patients yearly. It typically requires four to six appointments to create a prosthesis, she said.
Her handmade prosthetics can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $13,000, depending on the body part she’s replicating.
Her practice is a Medicaid provider, and private insurance policies don’t have one standard of coverage. The federal Medicare program considers facial prosthetics to be medically necessary as long as they are ordered by a physician, she said.
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Vest tries to keep her five-day-a-week schedule limited to two appointments a day. She said she needs a balance between her time with patients and her time in her laboratory, painting, sizing and designing lifelike body parts.
“Sometimes, you’re not necessarily talking about why they’re in your chair but just talking about life in general,” Vest said.
A lot of her business comes from doctor referrals and word of mouth. The TLC show has also sparked interest.
She was contacted in 2019 by Lucky Dog Films, a television company in Maryland. After sending in some film reels, she signed a contract with Discovery in spring 2021 to get her show on TLC. Neither Vest nor TLC would discuss the contract terms.
Vest has treated patients as young as 7 to as old as 102 for non-weight-bearing prosthetics. Patients come for all sorts of reasons, from accidents to illness.
And she is one of 44 people in the world who can call anaplastology a career, she said. She’s grateful it lets her merge her passion for art and science.
That comes across to her patients.
“I’ve found a friend,” Bonner said. “Allison will always be a friend.”
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