OGDENSBURG eye care center conducts first Lasik surgery on seven patients
JOHNSON NEWSPAPERS
OGDENSBURG — Dr. Debra A. Koloms looked up nonchalantly Wednesday from her cup of instant noodle soup and described her previous day’s work.
“We did 13 eyes yesterday,” she said.
Dr. Koloms is a staff ophthalmologist with Center for Sight, the Northern New York eye care business with offices here and in Potsdam, Massena, Gouverneur, Lowville and Watertown.
On Tuesday, the office at 420 Ford St. that opened in April stepped into the arena of modern eye care when Dr. Koloms performed 13 Lasik surgical procedures on seven patients. Six of them had both of their eyes’ sight improved by the laser procedure while a seventh had one eye done.
Lasik surgery reshapes the cornea to sharpen vision. The cornea is the transparent front part of the eye that covers the pupil and the iris. It is about half a millimeter thick and 11.5 millimeters in diameter. It is also essential to the eye itself.
“The cornea is the window into the eye,” Dr. Koloms said.
Lasik, according to the doctor, is a common remedy for both near- and farsightedness and is considered an alternative to having to wear glasses and contact lenses.
“It’s for people who don’t want to be dependent on their glasses,” Dr. Koloms said.
Performing delicate eye surgery on seven people in one day might conjure up unsavory images of patients being crammed into and pushed out of a doctor’s chair with assembly-line efficiency. But it’s not that way at all.
“It takes about 10 minutes,” Dr. Koloms said, adding that the patient is alert the entire time and generally not nervous about the procedure.
Dr. Koloms said she has performed “hundreds” of Lasik surgeries.
She is no stranger to cutting-edge ophthalmology. Last April, she performed another delicate surgery at Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center to correct a condition called strabismus. A disorder of binocular vision, strabismus occurs when the eyes aren’t aligned properly and point in different directions.
On Wednesday, Dr. Koloms was back at Claxton-Hepburn to perform cataract surgery.
