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SALT LAKE CITY -- At his job, John Taylor was trying to repair a clogged line carrying caustic fluid when it broke, flooding his left eye. He had been legally blind in that eye for the past two years, seeing only light and darkness.
"Mr. Taylor, in the beginning, had a lot of scars, and his skin wouldn't even heal for months and months," says Dr. Majid Moshirfar, surgeon at the Moran Eye Center. "We had to put amniotic membrane or placental tissue on them to make them heal."
John was seeing the first day better than I have ever seen.
–Dr. Majid Moshirfar, Moran Eye Center
John's cornea was gone. The lens of the eye was severely damaged. Stem cells surrounding the cornea were destroyed. The trauma also spawned cataracts and a form of glaucoma.
But that was then! Watching John shoot a bow at his home in Lyman, Wyo., the sight from that one-time damaged eye is remarkable.
"I came in the day after surgery, and it was amazing to see what I saw," John says. "I could see Wendy, my wife, sitting 6 feet away."
"They asked John if he could read the eye chart, and he started to read it; and with each line that he was able to read I just, tears, you know?" Wendy says. "Isn't life wonderful?"
John got a synthetic artificial cornea. That in itself is not new, but the way the cornea was sculpted broke new ground.
Instead of manually cutting with a knife, Moshirfar used an IntraLase laser -- normally used for LASIK surgeries -- to cut two concentric holes, superimposed on one another as a perfect fit.
"Using that Femtosecond LASIK technology and combining it with the synthetic cornea is actually the first thing that we have ever done, as far as I know, in the United States," Moshifar says.
The restored image that now moves through the pupil and the lens, all the way back to the retina, is impeccably precise -- to the tune of .01 millimeter.
"John was seeing the first day better than I have ever seen," Moshirfar says. "Most of the time when we do artificial corneas, our patients are 2200 or 2100; he was already seeing 20/25 that first day."
Shooting a bow, driving a car, reading a magazine -- John does it all, and from an eye that, with repaired optics, may actually be better even than a normal eye.
"Even if the entire cornea rejects, which it won't, that central part will always be crystal clear; and he has the best optics, actually a better optics than yours or mine," Moshirfar says.
Moshirfar hopes to publish John's case in a professional ophthalmology journal. The outcome could provide surgeons an option now for more precision sculpting of artificial cornea transplants.
E-mail: eyeates@ksl.com
