CORRECTION OF NEARSIGHTEDNESS: SOME FACTS ABOUT RADIAL KERATOTOMY (RK)
Why RK Becomes Necessary in Some Situations
Some critics of the radial keratotomy procedure maintain that it is cosmetic surgery, thus relegating it to a lesser role as a method of treatment for the eye. Dr. Michael R. Deitz of Kansas City argues that the benefits RK are first, functional improvement and second (though less important), cosmetic improvement. "Function appears to be far more important to the patients I have treated," he told the August 1980 Kerato-Refractive Society Symposium on RK. "They're far more interested in how well they see the world than how well the world sees them."
Dr. Deitz stressed the importance of unaided good vision in times of emergency. Automobile drivers with high myopia cannot afford to lose their corrective glasses while driving in high-risk situations. Or, in the event of fire while asleep at a hotel, a guest who was nearsighted might he hard pressed to make his way to the exit, Dr. Deitz pointed out.
A Necessary and Beneficial RK
Nickolas Totora of Springfield, Massachusetts lay on the operating table at the Massachusetts General Hospital, the sixty-seventh Boston metropolitan area person to undergo RK through the first quarter of 1984. Within fifteen minutes of the beginning of surgery, 20-year-old Nickolas was up and out of the operating room. He was anxious to "have a look at my new vision." His left eye had been cured of nearsightedness only a month before, and the right eye was the one done now.
"I had begun wearing eyeglasses at the age of two," the patient said, "and they didn't do more than act as a crutch. My vision was getting worse. After entering college, my lenses were so thick, I had to put them on before getting out of bed in the morning to see my way clearly to the bathroom. I couldn't read any of my textbooks without them. Once I was giving a speech to the student body and one of the lenses fell out of its frame. I had to abort the speech. Was I ever embarrassed? That's when I prevailed on my parents to pay for this double session of operations. I don't want to wear eyeglasses anymore."
As he spoke, Nickolas reached for a pair of eyeglass frames in which the left lens had been poked out. He had been using just the right lens for his eyes and seeing normally without the lens for his left. Nickolas pushed against the right lens and popped it out of its frame. "I won't need these at all anymore," the young man said.
Looking at the eye first operated on, through a slit lamp, we saw the right radial cuts that had been made in Nickolas' cornea. They were peripheral to that part of it covering the iris, showing only as faint lines which were minute scars of healing.
After the operation, an antibiotic eye drop is used and the patient is ordinarily patched for twenty-four hours, as mentioned earlier. But this patient declined so much as a bandage for the newly operated eye. The bandage was not put on so as to permit Nickolas the self-testing of his vision after surgery.
His first comment as he covered his corrected left eye and looked at a wall chart out of his newly cured right was, "Oh boy, I can read even the small letters on line 8, D E F. . ."
*48/127/5*
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