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Dec 23, 2008 8:24 am US/Central
A New Option Beyond LASIK Surgery
WYOMING, Minn. (WCCO) ―
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This image shows where the implantable contact is placed in the eye.
Starr Surgical
For Kiki Koralesky it's about the light, the focus and finding the twinkle in a child's eye. She is a portrait photographer and as you stroll through a gallery of her work at the Fairview Lakes Medical Center nursery in Wyoming, Minn., you can see she has a talent for capturing an infant's essence on film.
It's hard to believe she was legally blind when she took them.
"I knew I had the gift of a good eye," said Koralesky. "I just didn't have the gift of [good] sight."
Koralesky wanted to join the million-plus Americans who have LASIK eye surgery each year but she was so myopic, or near-sighted, her vision was worse than what LASIK can fix.
The best LASIK candidates have a prescription for correction of minus 3 to minus 9. Koralesky's eyes were minus 17. That is at the very limit of available contact lens strength. She even joked that her eyeglasses were so thick, NASA could use them to see the farthest stars in outer space.
In many ways she was grateful for her profession, because her sharpest view of the world came only through a camera's viewfinder. "When I was looking through my camera and the lens, it was like that was my set of eyes, because it was a super-high-powered lens to see things up close that otherwise I wouldn't see without it," said Koralesky.
Eye surgeon Dr. Mark Lobanoff suggested a new generation of implantable lens, the Visian Lens, by Staar Surgical. It is permanently inserted under the surface of the eyeball.
"A very small incision is made in the cornea, the clear, domed tissue at the front of the eye," explained Lonaoff. "Through that we inject the lens, [which is] made out of a new material known as collamer, that is very soft, very flexible and extremely thin. Then my job is to tuck that lens underneath the blue or brown iris so the lens sits behind the iris but in front of the natural lens [of the eye.]"
Koralesky was awake for the entire procedure, which takes about 10 minutes per eye. Five minutes later in recovery, she could see 20-20 or better. Lobanoff said he believes the lens company's literature, which claims 99 percent patient satisfaction.
"In our practice so far, all the patients that I have implanted this lens are very, very happy," Lobanoff said. "And so my own personal group of patients have 100 percent acceptance rate and really like it."
Koralesky said you can put her at the top of that list. "I didn't know you could see the leaves. I didn't know you could see features on birds and know you could see so many stars. I didn't know the moon had an outline."
At about $3,000 an eye, it is a bit more expensive than LASIK. Like LASIK, insurance does not generally pay for the procedure.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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