Amazing Eye Operation Saves Eyesight

Imagine sustaining an eye injury so serious, doctors are hard pressed just to save it. But the eye is so complex that missing something as seemingly simple as the iris, the colored part, can be disabling.

It's near perfect weather days that Jeff Pollastrini lives for, days he catches waves off the north shore of Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands. He was just about to call it a day after a some great rides, floating calmly in the water when his surfboard crashed into his right eye.

“I never saw it and I couldn't see immediately,” said Pollastrini. “What I could see, it was just yellow, spots, hazy and then I came up out of the water and I touched my eye and there was blood on my hand and I started praying immediately.”

It was even worse than he feared. Pollastrini's eye had literally exploded on impact. Over the next three months, he had multiple eye operations, including repair of a retinal detachment and a cornea transplant. It saved his eye but not much of his sight.

The problem was that both the internal lens and the iris had been blown out of Pollastrini’s eye in the initial impact.

“The iris serves a very important function and that is to regulate the amount of light coming into the eye and to adjust according to the amount of light that comes into the eye,” said Dr. Kenneth Rosenthal of the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Most of the time, Pollastrini had to squint against the tropical sun.

“I compare it to somebody putting a laser beam into your eye, the feeling of that,” said Pollastrini.

But then Pollastrini heard about Dr. Rosenthal, who was doing an Food and Drug Administration trial on an artificial iris. They come in various types and colors. Pollastrini's artificial iris was a combination iris and lens. It was inserted last October in an operation similar to a lens implant after cataract removal.

“They don't open and close like the normal pupil,” said Rosenthal. “But, we've established that a four to six millimeter pupil, depending on the patient, is adequate for most lighting circumstance,”

Today, Pollastrini’s back surfing. But more amazing is, he can now see 20/40 out of his injured eye. That’s good enough to pass a driver's test without glasses.

“By the first week I had already forgotten that I was blind in my right eye, it was amazing,” said Pollastrini. “Like 3 years had just disappeared of being blind.”

Rosenthal says the results so far have been excellent at reducing glare and light sensitivity with the artificial iris, which helps for trauma after eye surgery and for certain congenital eye problems.

By the way, Pollastrini was injured at the same beach where the young woman lost her arm to a shark.