Eyeworld

MAY 2012

EyeWorld is the official news magazine of the American Society of Cataract & Refractive Surgery.

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May 2012 EW IN OTHER NEWS 65 The fine art of ocularistry by Faith A. Hayden EyeWorld Staff Writer T iny palettes of paint in red, blue, and yellow sit on a work desk in front of an office window. A coffee cup stuffed with colored pencils and paintbrushes of every bristle size and shape rests at the side, waiting to be used. There's ruby thread and matches and tape. Vials of this, tubes of that, and a magnifying glass ready to enlarge the teeniest of de- tails. These items are not what one expects to observe when walking into an eyecare office, yet they are vital components to patients' ocular health and well being. These are the tools of an artist, an ocularist named Michael Hughes. "There are not a lot of people who make eyes," said Mr. Hughes while showing me around his Northern Virginia office. "It's pretty obscure. Most big cities have one or two at most. Some states like Mon- tana have none. Richmond is a city of almost 1 million people, and I go there once a week. But it's fun. [Ocularisty] is the best kept secret because I really dig what I do." Mr. Hughes' passion for his craft is palatable. His office is full of cu- riosities and eye oddities—a decora- tive history of the profession behind wall-mounted glass displays. There's the modern eye models made of plastic, history books, black-and- white photos of predecessors, cases upon cases of archaic glass eyes spanning the globe, and all the pe- culiar items the profession used to insert into an empty socket, from gold and coral to mesh and mag- nets. Like many ocularists, Mr. Hughes stumbled into the profession by accident. Unsure how to use a fine arts degree, he happened to hear about a graduate program in the field, and the rest is history. Others are born into it, like Barbara Spohn-Lillo, a Colorado-based ocularist who apprenticed under her father. "My father taught me how to do this, but I didn't inherit a business," she said. "He developed a program in California at Stanford [University] Medical Center where you could get a degree in anaplastology." The program is since defunct, which worries Ms. Spohn-Lillo. "Some of us are getting older and are wondering who is going to take over," she said. "There are not a lot of places to get trained. It's one of those niche fields." Ocularistry may be a fringe pro- fession largely under the radar of the general public, but it's a critical spe- cialty for those missing an eye. It takes about 8 man-hours to make a prosthetic, and an ocularist can fit a patient in a couple of visits. As Ms. Spohn-Lillo points out, her profession doesn't simply create a realistic-looking prosthetic. Ocular- ists train patients how to function as continued on page 66

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