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NEW YORK MAGAZINE
March 10, 1997
BEYOND GLASSES:THE LATEST LASER EYE SURGERY
On September 20, 1996, the phrase "miracle of modern science" took on new meaning for me. I am in a stark, dimly lit room, wearing a shower cap and my street clothes, reclining on a surgical BarcaLounger, fully awake and alert. My right eye, numbed by anesthetic drops and held open by a speculum, peeks out from the opaque white plastic drape that covers my other eye and the rest of my face. Next to me is a huge, sleek hybrid machine-part laser, part microscope, part computer-that casts a red dot surrounded by a halo of tiny, white lights onto my eyeball. Dr. Mark Speaker, a celebrated New York eye surgeon, is about to sculpt my right eye-and, in doing so, change my life.
 Ready, Aim, Fire:
Dr. Mark Speaker one of the top eye surgeons in New York and a true believer in laser technology, prepares to zap the eye of author Melinda Blau - and free her from Coke-bottle glasses forever.
The procedure, officially termed laser-assisted in-situ keratomileusis (LASIK)-better known as "flap and zap"-takes minutes. It is considered dangerously experimental by some, the wave of the future by others. "Vision correction by laser surgery will become as common a rite of passage among middle-class consumers as braces," predicts Dr. Marguerite McDonald, a former New York ophthalmologist now practicing in Louisiana.
Analysts call this surgery the "most widely marketed medical procedure in history"-it's hard to miss the subway ads and infomercials-but New Yorkers, conservative, skeptical, and demanding by nature, are not impressed by the hard sell. So although the practice has taken off in other parts of the U.S. and in Canada, it's just catching on in New York. Doctors in California do four operations for every one performed here.
Dr. Speaker, who calls the technology "the most exciting I've worked with," has done this procedure around 400 times to date-ten to fifteen a week, probably more than any other practitioner in the tri-state region. Director of corneal and refractive surgery at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, Speaker also teaches other doctors how to do it. Fewer than 10 percent of the area's approximately 1,200 ophthalmologists currently perform refractive laser surgery, and of those, a handful of talented doctors stand out - Marc Odrich and Steve Trokel at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center East; Ken Moadel and Sandra Belmont at Manhattan Eye and Ear; Peter Hersh in Teaneck, New Jersey; Eric Donnenfeld in Nassau County. Speaker himself is listed in both America's Best Doctors and New York's 1996 "Best Doctors in New York" survey.
I try to keep this in mind when he picks up his first instrument-a device resembling a tiny apple slicer that puts ink marks on my cornea. As he places a suction ring over the marks, Dr. Speaker warns that the world will go black. It does. Then, using a microkeratome - a miniature carpenter's plane-he carefully slices a pancake sliver of my cornea, leaving a piece intact: the "flap." Those ten seconds feel like forever.
He peels back the flap and dries the underlying tissue with foam swabs. Guided by a computerized contour map of my eye, he vaporizes the too-high elevations of my cornea with a cool ultraviolet beam of light. The rat-a-tat of the machine-the "zap"-is accompanied by a faint smell of burning flesh.
It's over in minutes. The only pain is the sting of adhesive tape as Dr. Speaker lifts the drape, which seems to have been Superglued to the skin around my eye. This time, at least, I am prepared. At once a veteran and a pioneer, I had my left eye done the day before.
I sit up slowly; Dr. Speaker holds my arm as l slide onto my feet and walk twenty steps into an examination room. Before my surgery, I couldn't see the big E on the eye chart. Now I can read the next-to-last line. The staff gives me a pack of eye drops I'm to use for the next week, and five minutes later, walking down Second Avenue, I am almost giddy. Through a clear plastic shield on the newly zapped eye and a pair of giant nonprescription sunglasses, I can read street signs and see the faces of passersby-without contact lenses or Coke-bottle glasses. I am no longer legally blind.
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