The artificial eyes that ocularist Carolyn O'Neill makes have been used in some strange ways. One of her patients adorned a birthday cake with his eye. Another placed his eye in the bottom of a friend's beer glass. A few of O'Neill's younger patients have taken their eyes out at school in exchange for petty change from classmates.
Having the ability to remove an eye, though, can lead to unexpected problems. "We've had dogs take eyes and run with them," she says.
O'Neill is soft-spoken, but that shouldn't be mistaken for a lack of enthusiasm. She loves her work. "I feel like being an ocularist is a calling," she says. "I don’t think it’s just a job."
She's been in the eye-making business for more than 30 years and now works alongside her son-in-law, whom she trained, at Mager And Gougelman of St. Louis, located in Brentwood. The office is small, decorated almost exclusively with eye-related art. It includes several small rooms containing north-facing windows, which provide the light that ocularists need to paint anatomically accurate irises.
Most patients who come to O'Neill have lost their eyes due to injury or disease. The concave, plastic pieces that she creates don't give individuals the ability to see, but they do allow a person's damaged eye to go relatively unnoticed—at least by most people.
"I'm sure I could be fooled," says O'Neill, "But I can generally tell when it's artificial. The eyelids give it away." Whenever she meets someone, she looks at their eyes first—she notices the shape, the hue, the gradient of the iris. "Sometimes I'm thinking, 'Oh my, that'd be a hard color to paint,'" she says.
Over the years, she's received some unusual requests from patients. She painted an eight-ball on the artificial eye of an individual who loved playing pool. Another patient was a high-school wrestler. She painted his school logo on the iris, adding extra bits of red thread to create intense veining on the eye's edges. "It was very scary," she says. "I don't know if it made him a better wrestler, but he felt better about himself." That same patient went on to study to be a radiology technician, so she drew a biohazard symbol on the iris of his prosthesis.
She's accommodating, but there is a limit. When a patient asked to have a naked woman drawn on his iris, she told the patient that she would do so, but only if she could draw a stick figure. He eventually decided against the idea.
Each eye she creates costs around $2,800, and most patients' insurance covers the majority of the price. Her office also does pro-bono work, because, as O'Neill says, "No one who needs an eye should go without an eye."
Want to see how an artificial eye prosthesis is made? Follow O'Neill through the entire process.
