Medicine Needs Victors: Roger Pontz and The Bionic Eye Team

>>I don’t know when, I don’t know what, and I
don’t know how, but I will see something again. [ Music ] I was 14 and I had an eye test,
it was the start of ninth grade. I was seeing fine, but they knew that
there was something there so they sent me down here to the University of Michigan. And they diagnosed me as
having retinitis pigmentosa. It starts out with night blindness,
and you know, it just goes from there to your side vision to ending
up in the tunnel vision. I had no idea when I was going to totally
lose my vision, so you just live life as normal as you could every day.>>I mean he just amazed me every day at
how he accepts things and deals with things. It amazes me, still.>>Even though they are functional
at home, they want to see.>>Yeah.>>Last year we heard that FDA had approved a
retinal chip that stimulates the inner retina, or the nerve fibers on the
retina that still remain. And we felt that we would be a
good center to do the surgeries.>>So I was contacted by Mr. Pontz, who had
been a patient of ours, and he was like, “Cary, how can I get that device?” It was really like, we really need
to go at this and get it done.>>You know, we formed a team
and became a part of this. The device gets a signal from the camera, which
is mounted on the glasses, and people can make out shapes and things like that based
on the flickering lights that they see.>>Uniqueness of this is that your
putting a prosthetic device into the eye.>>The surgery itself actually
was pretty straightforward, but really the hard work starts after that. And it’s the patient who’s doing that,
the training, the visual rehabilitation, learning how to interpret the signals
that are generated by the camera.>>Most of these patients have been
without sight for many, many years. So with different head movements
and visual skills, they’re really learning a
new way of seeing again.>>In contrast to many of the other
surgeries that we do is the fact that this was a year ago a hopeless situation. And now, there is hope for the first time. This is really because people have spent
decades building the University of Michigan and building the Kellogg Eye Center
into a world-class leader in eye care.>>It really did take a team. And I’m so grateful to everybody on that team.>>This is so much different. I can tell like when people move, I can tell
when my grandson runs through the house. Because he’s only two and he’s fast. It’s a big, big improvement. I was the first man in the
country to have it done.>>The first one was the woman,
and she went a week before and he went a week after
and he was the first man. And that blows my mind. Roger Pontz from Reed City is the first
man in the country to get this implant. I don’t enough words to thank them for
that, I mean how do you thank a doctor for giving your husband back vision? [ Music ]