On Friday, Jamie Carley saw her son for the first time in 15 years. She cried right through her newly implanted bionic eye. “It was amazing. It was overwhelming,” she said. “He got a little teary, too.”
Carley suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that slowly kills retinal cells. She has been blind for 15 years, save for a faint light entering one eye.
In mid-November, she gained a chance to recover some of that loss. She underwent five hours of surgery at the UCHealth Eye Center at University of Colorado Hospital and awoke with a new vision system.
A microchip had been implanted in the retina of one eye. Over both eyes, a pair of glasses with a small camera wirelessly transmit video to her microchip, stimulating her optic nerve and sending visual information to her brain.
The surgery is extremely rare and, for now, limited to people blinded by a single disease. Carley is the first recipient in Colorado and the second in the western United States.
It’s also expensive. The device alone costs $150,000.
But if the surgery proves effective, it could be used to treat other causes of blindness, such as macular degeneration in old age.
“We’re pretty excited about it,” said Dr. Naresh Mandava, the surgeon who worked on Carley. “The exciting thing about it is it works.”
The new eye is a far sight from 20/20 vision. “It will help her navigating her house, going to the store,” Mandava said. “She has very coarse vision. She can identify shapes.”
On Friday, when Carley tried out her new eye, the hospital staff began by asking her to identify a window frame. Then they told her to keep scanning, go to her left … and there was her 29-year-old son, Jon Ferguson.
“I could see the outline, the shadow,” she said. “My tears were hidden behind the glasses.”
This week, she begins a long rehabilitation period, learning to improve her vision by using her brain to interpret the new optical signals. The university has agreed to follow her for five years and report on her progress to the Food and Drug Administration, which approved the device.
The bionic eye, formally the Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System, was invented by Second Sight. It says its device helps create the perceptions of patterns of light, which patients can learn to interpret with their retinal implant.
After 15 years of blindness, the Johnstown resident is thankful for “just being able to see anything, you know.”
Small changes loom large.
Like the first time she stepped outside. “Oh, my God, I just saw a car go down the street,” she exclaimed. “Instead of hearing things, I can now visualize them.”
David Olinger: 303-954-1498, dolinger@denverpost.com or @dolingerdp
