Nearsighted fix: I couldn’t tell who my friends were
Published: November 2, 2005
Barb Merriman was tethered to her first pair of eyeglasses at age 7. Without them, she was lost - literally.
“To go swimming with my friends, I couldn’t tell who my friends were,” she said. “I would have to tell them to come find me.”
As an adult, Merriman’s sight deteriorated so much that she couldn’t read the alarm clock on her bedside table without her glasses on. To read printed material, she had to hold it so close to her face that her eyes crossed.
Her glasses were a quarter-inch thick despite being outfitted with high index, or extra-thin, lenses. At work, she wore prescription safety glasses.
“It was like you were looking through a diving bell,” she said. “I hated wearing them.”
She felt disabled.
Precious sense
Sight “is our most precious sense,” Merriman said. “We take in so much through our eyes.”
The Billings woman waited 20 years for a corrective procedure that could help her - she was too near-sighted for Lasik surgery - and, last summer, it finally arrived.
Merriman underwent intraocular surgery, in which hard plastic lenses were implanted inside her eyes.
“Compared to glasses and contacts, I’d take this any day,” she said. “It is just like having no vision correction at all.”
Intraocular surgery was approved by the Food and Drug Administration about a year ago and is the only FDA approved surgery of its kind, said Dr. Mohammad Karbassi, an ophthalmologist at Billings Clinic who performed Merriman’s surgery.
Karbassi said intraocular technology first emerged in the 1950s but only recently was refined enough for public consumption. It is similar to the technology used for cataract surgery.
In separate procedures, Karbassi slipped a tiny plastic lens into each of Merriman’s eyes through a 6 mm incision and clipped it to her iris.
“The beauty of this is it’s reversible,” Karbassi said. “It also doesn’t alter the shape of the cornea.”
In Lasik surgery, which Karbassi also performs, layers of the cornea are shaved off to correct a patient’s vision.
“The more near-sightedness you are correcting, the more you are shaving off,” Karbassi said. “There has to be a limit.”
No Lasik surgery
Merriman’s eyes were beyond the limit, and she did not qualify for Lasik surgery.
She read about intraocular surgery in the newspaper shortly after it was FDA-approved last year.
“I said, ‘OK, this is what I’ve been saving my money for,’” she said. “I figured I’d have to go to a big city to have it done. We had it right here in Montana.”
Merriman said her eyes felt uncomfortable for about a day after each surgery, but she could immediately see clearly.
“The worst of the whole thing was getting the IV needle,” she said.
She cannot feel the lenses in her eyes, but she can see them in the mirror if she shines a bright light on herself.
There are risks associated with the surgery, including infections and long-term damage to the cornea. But to Merriman, the risks were minor.
“It’s the best money I ever spent,” she said. “I would have paid more.”
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