Dr. Lana Del Porto

Right.

No.

And the problem with that is that the edges of the iris are your drainage system for the eye.

There's like a spongy system on the edges of the iris that absorb the fluid because your eye is constantly making fluid and absorbing it.

And it blocks it off.

Right.

It blocks it off.

It permanently scars it and leaves you with debilitating glaucoma and blindness.

What is a glaucoma?

Elevated eye pressure that then damages the optic nerve.

And causes visual field loss and tunnel vision.

When you see someone's eyes, can you go, you've got a glaucoma?

It's always... Not from the front.

So when I examine a patient on the slit lamp microscope and I take a lens, I can use that lens to look at the back of their eye in real time and look at their optic nerve.

So when they have glaucoma, the optic nerve looks terrible.

There's all this loss of nerve fibers.

Okay.

And the other way you can look for glaucoma is to actually put... I'm getting very...

you know, sciency now.

You put a mirrored contact lens on the patient's eye to look into those angles of the iris, to look at that spongy system called the trabecular mesh to see if it's blocked, to see if it's scarred.