A giver of clear vision
“We”™re running 45 minutes late,” says Dr. Gerald Zaidman, emerging from his director”™s office and a desk piled high with case folders into the busy waiting room in the ophthalmology department at Westchester Medical Center.
He has grabbed a late lunch before seeing his next patient, a girl on the cusp of her teenage years who waits with her father. She is there for a corneal scraping, an outpatient procedure done in the ophthalmology office. Down the hall, an inmate in a green jumpsuit from a state prison shuffles in chains under guard to his eye appointment. The surgeon leads us back into an office crammed with bound medical volumes, paperwork and mementos.
“Your eyes are two different colors,” he tells one of his visitors, leaning on his elbows across the desk to study her irises. “That”™s not uncommon.”
“I”™m awfully busy,” says Zaidman, whose surgical skills and pediatric specialty are in demand internationally. “As my patients say, I must know what I”™m doing. I guess so.”
Indeed, one would guess so. In December, the 61-year-old surgeon completed his 3,000th corneal transplant at the medical center in Valhalla. The complex microscopic procedure was performed on a 3-year-old girl from Bayside, Queens, who was born with a dermoid cyst on her cornea. The deformed tissue was removed and a donor”™s cornea, supplied by the New York Eye Bank for Sight Restoration, was sewn into place.
Having reached that medical milestone, which briefly cast Zaidman into the public eye in Westchester, the surgeon did not look back. “I”™ve probably done another 30 transplants” since then, he says. “I do roughly 10 a month, about 120 a year.”
But Zaidman in his practice goes where most transplant surgeons do not go ”“ into the eyes of children.
Children account for only .03 percent of all corneal transplants, he says. There are about 600 such pediatric transplants in the U.S. each year, and Zaidman says he does about 30 of those. Westchester Medical Center officials put the national contribution of Zaidman and his surgical team slightly higher, at 6 percent to 7 percent of all pediatric corneal transplants.
The surgeon is in rare company. Among thousands of corneal specialists nationwide, “only a few hundred of us” routinely work with children, he says. “For the average corneal surgeon, he would do 99 percent of his cases on adults and 1 percent on kids.” While adults make up 85 percent of Zaidman”™s total patient caseload, one out of five of the transplants he performs are on children. “The kids are like my passion and my niche,” he says.
“It”™s all microsurgery, but children”™s eyes are like two-thirds the size of an adult.” It is more delicate and more time-consuming work. Zaidman has performed surgery on infants as young as 3 months old. “It just is a tremendous undertaking,” he says. “But if you work at it, you can do it. It made me a better surgeon.”
Raised in the boroughs of New York City, Zaidman in his youth aspired to more publicly glorious pursuits. “I never thought I was going to be a doctor. Growing up in the days of the astronauts, I wanted to be an astronaut,” he says.
But outer space seemed out of reach when Zaidman failed the vision test for his driver”™s license. Without 20-20 vision, “I somehow convinced myself that I couldn”™t be an astronaut.”
In high school and at Queens College, Zaidman excelled at science, “but I found it so hard and cold.” A careers guidance counselor told him he showed an aptitude for computers and medicine. “I probably should have picked computer,” he says, smiling.
But Zaidman “liked to talk to people,” which physicians tend to do along with the science. He was admitted to Yeshiva University”™s Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
“I just fell in love with medicine from the beginning,” he says. “I love working with kids.”
He expected to be a pediatrician. But an elective course in ophthalmology and fellowship training at the University of Pittsburgh Eye and Ear Hospital in the early 1980s brought him to a medical frontier.
His mentor in Pittsburgh, Dr. Stuart Brown, decided to do corneal transplants on children. “There was nobody in the U.S. and North America who was interested in doing transplants on kids,” Zaidman recalls. Others had tried and failed. But his eccentric mentor “felt he could do it ”“ and he did.”
As word spread of the work being done in Pittsburgh, “We had a kid who came all the way from Turkey,” says Zaidman, “and he was the first child that I did.”
Many more have followed in the last 30 years, as Zaidman continued his rare practice in Virginia before returning to metropolitan New York. Parents and physicians hear of him by word of mouth and find him through Internet searches, some of which lead to the website of the Pediatric Keratoplasty Association, which Zaidman founded and heads in Valhalla.
“I”™ve done transplants on kids from South Korea, Japan, Israel, Canada, France, South America, the Caribbean, Jordan and all over the United States,” he says. “Right now I”™m taking care of a kid from Hong Kong. I had a kid from Paris” recently.
Another child seeking clear vision will come from Israel this month. The Israeli had met another child from Israel who had made the medical journey to Valhalla.
Zaidman hustles down the hall to a treatment room. He readies instruments and gauze bandages for the corneal scraping, talking fast to his visitors all the while. He is hoarse-voiced, suppresses a cough.
“I have a four and-a-half-year-old,” says the master of corneal transplants. The cold symptoms are a father”™s lot.