Feel the burn (November 2007) by Paul McNally
Do your eyes need surgery?
Set your sight on the target, even if that means a laser aimed at your eyeballs
Powerful sight is a competitive sport in this world. The man who spots the road sign in the dark, the gorgeous ass in a crowd or the cricket ball whirling towards him is already a cut above the bloke squinting out the grit from under his contact lens.
Though glasses mean you can wear a designer label even when naked and contact lenses let you change the colour of your eyes to orange, red or black, every man with subpar sight has a Lord of the Flies nightmare that without the help of modern life he’d be blind, useless and eventually roasted up like Piggy.
When an eyeball fills a TV monitor, it looks like a terrified animal. Its lids flap and flit, lathering with tears, until the prongs are produced
Enter science. With a whip of a laser and 14 grand in the bank you can have perfect vision. If you can’t read this magazine without your glasses, theoretically after LASIK surgery, you’ll be able to shoot a revolver at snakes in the desert at 100 paces (or actually have sex with your girlfriend in focus).
You see tomato. I see a red splodge
When an eyeball fills a TV monitor, it looks like a terrified animal. Its lids flap and fl it, lathering with tears, until the prongs are produced to hold open your lids.
Our man Chris feels like he’s blinking, but his lid movement is restricted. Blinking would interrupt the laser. You also need to stare dead ahead. That’s why you can’t get lasered while unconscious, your eyes would roll back into your head and they’d have to laser through the top of your skull to fix your corneas. So instead, Chris – glasses folded up beside him – is petrified into the classic Clockwork Orange pose. If you think you’re going to freak out, there’s the option to pop a Valium, on the house. Meanwhile ophthalmologist Dr Zoran Aleksic hunches over his microscope contemplating a London tube map of yellow and green markings.
This is Aleksic’s guide as to where the laser needs to go to fix Chris’s cornea. The actual lens and eyeball are left untouched. It’s the cornea (with the lens) that refracts the light to a focal point. If you’re shortsighted, the images are focusing in front of your retina. If long-sighted, they’re focusing behind. By reshaping the curvature and shape of the cornea – which heals miraculously fast and is fixed, compared to the lens which fl exes depending on what you’re looking at – you can fix your sight.
Wake up, it’s the future
This isn’t the future – LASIK surgery has been rumbling around since 1991. It’s taken 15 years for suspicion to wane. The first frightening steps were taken in Columbia, 1948. Dr Jose Barraquer would remove 60 percent of the cornea, freeze it, and then use a soapy lather to reshape it. The cornea was then sewn back into place. He was the first man to suggest operating on a healthy eye exclusively to fix vision. He was often successful (except the freezing occasionally caused damage) and he laid the groundwork for today’s LASIK surgery. These days the equipment, as you would hope, is more than a needle and thread.
Most important is the tracker, which Aleksic is very happy with. “It tracks your eye at 200 times per second,” he says excitedly. It’s the contraption that switches off the laser automatically if you move your eye. “We’re in the operating room,” says Aleksic of his patient last week, “and she wouldn’t even open her eyes – a grown woman. I asked if she was going to let me in with my laser and she held her hands up to her face like this,” putting his hands on his eyes, a giant grin on his face.
Chris sits rigid. The tracker whirs and beeps. Aleksic gets down to business. First Chris’s eye turns a suffocated purple on the screen as the cornea is stained with a gentian violet dye to mark it, so Aleksic can fit the cornea back into place perfectly. He then feels a suction pressure (the most invasive part of the operation) as the front of the cornea is sliced open. This creates what Aleksic casually calls “a flap”. For Chris, everything starts to get black. The front layer of his cornea is coming right off. He’s blind for five seconds. Then the surface of his eye is flapped to the side and his vision fades back in.
There’s a crackling hum of the laser. Aleksic has told Chris that when the Goldfinger-esque laser fires up he won’t smell burning flesh, but a mere ozone odour as the cornea’s tissue evaporates.
The laser goes to town under that fl ap. I smell nothing, but I think in these heightened circumstances the scary sound of that machine could make you smell anything. It shows up as a grooved line around the iris, like he’s wearing a tiny contact lens in the centre.
The entire procedure for both eyes lasts about 20 minutes.
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