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Vision
Correction at USNA After a Mid has signed their 2 for 7 papers, before
starting the second class year, and after some pre-commissioning briefings by
company, they will put in a request and receive a consult to be evaluated for
a PRK by ophthalmology. It is on a first
come, first served basis. They then
can schedule the surgery based on their academic and extracurricular (sports)
schedule. Every week a group of Mids come
in for the surgery, and then coming back the next day for follow-up wearing
their dark glasses and looking a little groggy from the pain meds. The ophthalmologists are all outstanding. “There is a little pain involved, but ok for a mid's pain tolerance level. My son hated not being allowed
to see for a couple of days (hard to play video games or watch movies that
way!). But it was worth it.” - Experienced Mom Perfect Vision Is Helping and Hurting Navy By DAVID S. CLOUD, BETHESDA, Md. (June 17, 2006) - Almost every Thursday
during the academic year, a bus carrying a dozen or so Naval Academy
midshipmen leaves Annapolis for the 45-minute drive to Bethesda, where Navy
doctors perform laser eye surgery on them, one after another, with
assembly-line efficiency.
Nearly a third of every
1,000-member Naval Academy class now undergoes the procedure, part of a
booming trend among military personnel with poor vision. Unlike in the
civilian world, where eye surgery is still largely done for convenience or
vanity, the procedure's popularity in the armed forces is transforming career
choices and daily life in subtle but far-reaching ways. Aging fighter pilots can
now remain in the cockpit longer, reducing annual recruiting needs. And recruits whose bad vision once would have disqualified
them from the special forces are now eligible, making the competition for
these coveted slots even tougher. But the surgery is also causing the military some
unexpected difficulties. By shrinking the pool of people who used to be
routinely available for jobs that do not require perfect eyesight, it has
made it harder to fill some of those assignments with top-notch personnel,
officers say. When Ensign Michael Shaughnessy had the surgery in his junior year at the
Naval Academy, his new 20-20 vision qualified him for flight school. And that is where he decided to go after graduating last
month ranked in the top 10 percent of his class, rather than pursuing a
career as a submarine officer. "The cramped
environment in submarines is something that turned me off," Ensign Shaughnessy, 22, said. For generations, Academy
graduates with high grades and bad eyes were funneled into the submarine
service. But in the five years since the Naval
Academy began offering free eye surgery to all midshipmen, it has missed its
annual quota for supplying the Navy with submarine officers every year. Officers involved say the
failure to meet the quota is due to many factors, including the perception
that submarines no longer play as vital a national security role as they once
did. But the availability of eye surgery to any
midshipman who wants it is also routinely cited. "Some
of the guys with glasses who would have gone to submarines or become
navigators are getting the chance to do something they'd rather do, and the
communities that are losing the people are not as happy about it as the
aviation community, which is gaining better candidates," said Cmdr.
Joseph Pasternak, the ophthalmologist who oversees the program at the
National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. In
the Naval Academy's class of 2006, 349 of the 993 midshipmen had the surgery,
up from 50 five years ago, according to Naval Academy records. Fewer than 30
percent of the academy students whose eyes qualify for the surgery choose not
to get it, and the number of holdouts is dropping every year, Commander
Pasternak said. Last week, a little after
10:40 a.m., Colin Carroll, a 21-year-old midshipman from Olney, Md., put
anesthetic drops in his eyes and lay down under the laser as Capt. Kerry
Hunt, a Navy doctor, and two assistants prepared to begin. "We're
locking the laser on now," Captain Hunt told him. Midshipman Carroll had
originally hoped to enter flight school but discovered not only that his eyes
were not good enough, but also that he was prone to kidney stones, ruling him
out of aviation entirely. He said he was "resigned" to entering the
Marine Corps or becoming an officer on a surface ship, neither an assignment
requiring perfect vision. But he decided to get the surgery anyway. By 10:49, both eyes were
done, though extremely bloodshot, and Mr. Carroll walked out wearing
sunglasses, declaring he could already see better. The procedure used by the
Navy, photorefractive keratectomy, or PRK, is different from the one used on
most civilians. That approach, known as laser-in situ keratomileusis,
or Lasik, requires cutting a flap in the surface of
the cornea and then using a laser to reshape the cornea. But
military doctors worry that the flap could come loose during combat,
especially in a supersonic fighter. So
rather than slicing into the cornea covering, Navy doctors grind it away. The approach requires a longer recovery as the
covering re-forms but leaves the eye more stable. The Air Force also limits
its pilots to PRK, but nonpilots can get either
procedure; because most students admitted to the academy aspire to fly, and
have already met strict vision standards, relatively few cadets have the
surgery, compared with the number at the Naval Academy. Army personnel,
including helicopter pilots and other aviators, are allowed to get either
procedure. One in every 200
midshipmen who has the surgery suffers initial complications, which can
usually be corrected, Commander Pasternak said. A study by the Navy soon
after the program began concluded that pilot trainees who had the surgery
graduated from flight school at higher rates than other pilots,
he added. Now that most midshipmen
meet the vision requirements, getting into pilot training is harder than
ever, depending almost entirely on academic class rank, military performance
while at the academy and other physical criteria. Last year, 310 midshipmen
competed for 272 flight training slots. Of those, 104 had undergone laser eye
surgery. "If we didn't have
PRK, where would those 104 midshipmen have gone?" said Capt. Michael
Jacobsen, of the Naval Academy's office of professional development.
"Tough to say, but we know they wouldn't have gone into flight
training." Expanding the pool of
potential pilots and members in the Navy Seals was the original goal of
making the surgery available, Commander Pasternak said, but it has become
increasingly popular with marines, who say it eliminates concerns that their
glasses will be damaged or clouded in dust storms during combat in Iraq and
Afghanistan. "We get at least
five times as many requests every year as we can keep up with," said
Commander Pasternak, a 1984 Naval Academy graduate who said he nearly left
the academy after learning his eyes were not good enough to allow him into
flight training. The growing number of
aspiring pilots has also made it harder to find candidates to become
"back-seaters," officers who serve as
navigators and weapons officers on planes, Navy officials say. The failure to produce
enough submarine officers, though, is the source of greatest worry to academy
officials and the Navy as a whole. This year the academy's quota was 120, but
only 88 midshipmen chose to go into submarines, according to academy records. Acknowledging the
decline, Capt. John R. Daugherty, the chief of staff in the Commander Naval
Submarine Forces, said in a statement, "There are many potential
contributing factors." The shortfall in the
submarine quota is made up from officers joining the Navy who do not attend
the academy. While there are no plans
to restrict the availability of the surgery, some Navy officials concede that
the procedure contributes to the submarine service losing midshipmen at the
top of their class, like Ensign Shaughnessy, a native
of Rochester, Minn., who formerly could not have gone to flight school. Going into submarines
"requires a lot more school, and after the academy a lot of people
aren't looking to go to a high-paced environment for a long period,"
Ensign Shaughnessy said. "And some people also
might see submarines as a less glamorous service assignment." In recent years, many of
the midshipmen to choose submarines have come from lower in the class
rankings than they did a decade ago, said a senior Navy official who declined
to release specific data and who was granted anonymity so he would discuss
internal Navy personnel matters. And academy graduates have been washing out of nuclear
power school, which they must complete before being commissioned as a
submarine officer, at an increasing rate over the last five years, according
to the Navy official and an outside expert who has studied the issue. In response, the Navy has
begun offering $15,000 bonuses and other incentives to get midshipmen with
better grades to join the submarine program.
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