News Anchor Dwight Lauderdale has LASIK and "Cheats Mother Nature" in the Public Eye
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News Anchor Dwight Lauderdale "Cheats Mother Nature" in the Public Eye
Weston Lifestyle
July 2004
With tens of thousands of eyes upon him, the cameras began to roll. This time, though, Channel 10 (ABC) News Anchor Dwight Lauderdale wasn't delivering the news; instead, it was his own eyes that were making the news.
Seeking to inform his viewers about what his doctor describes as "the world's best kept secret," Lauderdale recently underwent LASIK corrective eye surgery in the public eye (no pun intended), performed by Cory M. Lessner, M.D. who is the Medical Director of Millennium Laser Eye Centers in Sunrise. He is one of a select few board-certified ophthalmologists in the country whose practice is limited to laser vision correction.
"People don't realize how easy it is," Lauderdale said. "I thought there must be many viewers who were in the same position as I was in - wanting to be free of reading glasses while at the same time, not wanting to compromise their distance vision," he said.
Lauderdale, who was farsighted, learned that he might be a candidate for corrective eye surgery after viewing a news story aired by his station about the Allegretto WaveLight laser, performed by Dr. Lessner. In addition to offering customed-guided LASIK, Dr. Lessner is the only doctor in Florida who currently offers treatment with this newest laser technology, which gained Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approval in October of 2003. Custom treatments are only available in the US for people with lower amounts of nearsightedness and astigmatism. If one is farsighted or has a more severe nearsighted prescription, the only option until now has been standard treatments.
"The Allegretto offers [potential candidates] the promise of visual quality associated with custom treatments through this wide spectrum of prescriptions," said Dr. Lessner.
Lauderdale scheduled his consultation when he realized just how critical the surgery was to his job performance. Because he was farsighted, reading the teleprompter, which is approximately twenty feet away from him, was never a problem. But reading a script without the assistance of glasses was. And then it happened.
"My worst case scenario," he said, "something happened to the teleprompter and I had the script in my hand (with no glasses), and I could not read it. Fortunately, I remembered enough about the story that I could tell the viewers what the story was about. It was the most uncomfortable feeling in the world; all this happening while I was live on the air. At that point I realized that I had to do something."
Using the Allegretto laser, Lauderdale says that Dr. Lessner was able to "cheat mother nature," whereby one eye was treated for reading and one for distance. These strategies are called monovision and modified monovision. Coincidentally, during his consultation, Lauderdale indicated that he had tried monovision in the past and that it had not worked for him.
"I wish I had a dollar for every time I met with a prospective patient over the age of 40 who came in with negative pre-conceived notion only to find out that this monovision worked wonderfully for them. You won't know if it works for you unless you try it," says Dr. Lessner.
"I was on and off the table in less than ten minutes. It's actually more agonizing for the people watching it because it looks like you should feel something and you feel nothing - your eyes are numb. You feel someone touching you, and that's it. I was surprised at how easy it is - this is the most fascinating aspect of it. The preparation time was more than the actual procedure," says Lauderdale.
As for the results?
"I couldn't be happier," Lauderdale said.
Just minutes after the surgery, he was amazed to see that he was able to read his watch. Even more incredible, he says, just one hour after the procedure, he read a restaurant menu without glasses for the first time in seven years!
Now fully confident about his eyesight in front of the camera, Lauderdale says. "I wish I had done it sooner."
