Difficulty in total eye transplants, optometrists please help!?!

Transplanting a whole eye into the socket is probably the easy part. Providing the 6 exterior muscles are still there and in working order, and able to be reattached to the outside of the eye , then getting the blood flow to the retina connected up to the rest of the blood stream of the body via hundreds of microscopic blood vessels.

There are approximately 1.2 million neural connections that have to be made for that eye to function after. Hundreds of thousands of them go from the optic nerve to the brain , and hundreds of thousands go from the brain to the optic nerve.

That is over 1.2 million reasons right there why it can't be done.

Optician

Everything Footprintz said is correct. The blood supply probably wouldn't be as big of an issue, because most of it comes from a handful of larger vessels, but the nerve reconnection is the major issue.
In addition, as with any other tissue, there's a very good chance of rejection. (Even corneal grafts, which in theory are immune-privileged tissues, can reject.) So usually the transplant recipient ends up on strong immune-suppressing and/or anti-inflammatory medications for the rest of their life. There's two problems with this: in the eye, inflamed tissues lose their transparency, thus substantially reducing visual clarity; and long-term use of many of these medications causes cataracts or glaucoma or both, again causing vision loss.

I'm an optometrist.