According to the family mythology-my Mother being an avid spinner of tales and embellisher of truths-when I was fitted for my first pair of glasses I looked up into the sky and was electrified by seeing stars for the first time. I’m extremely myopic-meaning my ability to distinguish objects up close is basically crap, but it turns out my distance vision was awful as well. Judging from the thickness of my current lenses and the amount of correction I need to see, putting on my glasses for the first time was probably like entering a strange new world. I wish my parents had had an iPhone back then to capture my alarm and wonder.
Working with eyes means I obsessively think about eyes, how they function for the people whose face they are in and the hundreds of external functions they also have. Eye contact is an integral way for us as people to connect with other organisms. We’re taught there is no substitute when creating and promote a trusting connection than looking another person in the face. You’re thought to be sincere and trustworthy merely by the physicality of your eyes and how they sit in your face. Whole conversations occur between people sometimes without words needing to be spoken, all because of cues taken from a person’s eyes. Our pupils expand and contract, tears well up, a simple change in the direction eyes are facing can say so many different things. Physical attraction? It’s conveyed with the eyes. Subsequently there’s a huge industry tasked with making eyes more alluring, more captivating.
Our irises, which give us our individuality, vary in shade and hue and depth. A pigment called melanin is the cause. People with blue, green and gray eyes have lesser amounts of melanin, and researchers posit that 10,000 years ago everyone had brown eyes. As people started diosporia-ing off from Mesopotamia there wasn’t the same need for larger amounts of melanin to protect against UV rays, so human genetics selected and populated new eye colors with less and less melanin content.
I heard a story this morning about a friend who somehow detached his retina from the back of the eyeball. The retina is this elegant silky layer on the interior of the eyeball that takes what you see and codes it into neural signals that are delivered into the brain to be decoded. Because the retina has such an important function, retina specialists make a lot of money. Hearing about my friend created a scary place in my head. I’ve always been squeamish about my eyes, perhaps because it takes so much assistance for mine to work correctly. Before I put my glasses or my contact lenses on in the morning I’m not able to make my way in the world. The thought of getting something in my eye freaks me out to no end. I threw up in Art History class when we were forced to watch Un Chien Andalou, the Dali/Bunuel film that starts out with an eyeball getting sliced with a razor. I’m getting squigged out thinking about it.
The concept of a cataract surgery, where a surgeon cuts into the eye and destroys an integral part of the eyeball before sucking out that little part and inserting a clearer, not scratched or cloudy part was enough to send me racing to the toilet. That was until I got to see the surgery up close. Cataract surgery is elegant-quick, pain free and can restore and improve a patient’s sight. Being in an operating room, seeing the orchestra of an ophthalmologist, his tools of the trade, the precision of scrub techs and nurses, the hum of machines all work together like a Swiss watch. It’s incredible to witness.
I’m working now with a company called Diopsys, which has a world-class retinal monitoring system that shows how the retina functions. Much like any complex machine, the eye will exhibit changes to function before any sort of structural change. Other retinal devices like an OCT (Optical Coherence Tomography) show retinal structural change, but at that point what a Doctor is looking at is dead retinal cells. Basically an OCT shows you a crime scene. The device my company makes is able to identify unhealthy cells from less than optional functionality, so that a Doctor can make decisions that can save retinal cells. I’m lucky to have the opportunity to work for a company that is integral in saving sight for so many.
Because of the shape of my eyeballs and the complexity of my prescription I’ve never had contact lenses that did the job-either they did the job for distance or they did the job for close up. And when I turned 40, the age when nearly everyone loses focusing ability for near vision what was bad already got way worse. Imagine my delight when my new optometrist said he could design a custom set of lenses for my eyes. What he designed has radically changed how I see. I can read close up with no reading glasses. I can make out stuff at a distance I wasn’t able to before. It’s been truly life changing. By integrating a multi focal capacity to my new lenses my vision is like never before. It’s been one of the best things that have happened for me in years. A whole new world has opened up for me again.
The Wil World 