By Abrahm Hurt
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS — Sen. John Ruckelshaus, R-Indianapolis, knows the struggles of having eye problems.

Ruckelshaus is a glaucoma patient who has had 10 surgeries on his eyes. His two children, also glaucoma patients, have had both 19 and 21 surgeries on their eyes.

Glaucoma is a group of diseases that damage the eye’s optic nerve and can result in vision loss and blindness according to the National Eye Institute.

His own eye issues were what led Ruckelshaus to craft Senate Enrolled Act 158, which bans scleral tattooing. Scleral tattooing involves either scarring or inserting pigment under the eye’s mucous membrane to fill the white of the eye with color.

“What it is, is people will go in and they want the whites of their eyes to be a certain color, so these tattoo artists will basically inject into the eyeball, the white iris portion, a dye,” he said.
“Again, we don’t know about sanitary procedures, there’s no training and you just really need a trained physician to touch your eye and nobody else because of the risk of infection.”

“It’s terrifically dangerous,” Dr. Eugene Helveston, emeritus professor at the Indiana School of Medicine said.“It’s just contrary to any logical thing a person would do.”

Helveston questioned the motivation of anyone that would have this done because of the risk of infection and inflammation to the eye. The process involves using a needle to inject ink into the microscopic space between the sclera, or the white part of the eye, and the conjunctiva, a thin, clear layer on top of the sclera.

“It’s not an extension of any other kind of tattooing. It’s really a new thing of its own,” he said. “It would be like taking a beer with cyanide in it. It’s not really beer. It’s something quite different.”

As of July 1, any person that is not a licensed health care professional caught performing the procedure could face a $10,000 civil fine.

Ruckelshaus said this issue was brought to him by his neighbor Dr. Derek Sprunger, who is a member of the Midwest Eye Institute. While there have been a few cases of people having their eyeballs tattooed around the country, there have been none reported in Indiana.

The dangers of the procedure were widely publicized last fall when a model damaged her eyes when she attempted to have the whites tattooed purple.

“We wanted to get ahead of this trend that seems to be creeping across the country right now,” Ruckelshaus said. “I wouldn’t say it’s a wave-like some fashion trends are, but it is important. It’s awareness about how sensitive and how dangerous putting anything in your eye actually is and prevention of blindness.”

Indiana is the second state to pass measures against this kind of tattooing. Oklahoma first banned the practice in 2009.

FOOTNOTE: Abrahm Hurt is a reporter for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.