Hello!

My name is Robbie, I’m 21, and up until recently, 25th May 2009 3.30pm to be exact, I was hindered by my short-sighted eyes.

Like most people who wear glasses or contact lenses, I was always worrying about where I was going, if I needed extra contact juice, whether I’d need to take them out after what ever I was going to be doing, if my glasses would get in the way etc etc etc.

Sound familiar?

I’m only young but after 10 years of putting up with glasses or contact lenses I was really fed up with them. I’d been looking at laser eye surgery for years, since I was about 16, and always knew it would be the key to finally ditching my glasses and lenses and being able to see like everyone else. I’d looked at many different sources and read up on all the material I could get my hands on and most of it said it would be beneficial for a young person like myself to wait a few more years until I was at least 21 years of age or have a steady prescription for a couple of years.

I was 21 in March 2009, my prescription hadn’t changed for a good 18 months and a few of my friends had had it done, all of whom reported fantastic results after years of relying on annoying glasses or lenses; finally my time had come!

I’d seen various different TV adverts promoting many different companies offering “Life Changing Laser Vision Correction”. After looking into who had the best track record and who had done the most procedures I decided to go with Optical Express. My friends had all gone with Optical Express as well so it made sense for me to follow suit! Optical Express have done more laser vision correction procedures, world wide, than any other institution so I figured I’d be in safe hands. I booked the initial consultation at my local Optical Express in Torquay, Devon, didn’t wear my contact lenses for a day prior to the appointment and went along to be measured up to check my suitability for the surgery. The friendly staff measured various different aspects of my eyes:

• Pupil size
• Cornea thickness
• The different prescriptions all over the pupil
• They checked the health of my eyes

All of which was painless and took around an hour and a half from start to finish.

They also put these special pupil dilating drops in my eyes which enable them to look right into the back of the eye. The only downside to this is that your pupils are enormous so not only are you very sensitive to light, you also look like a freak! Only for a few hours though so it’s not to bad. After they’ve checked you out and you’ve finished up on all the crazy machines with spinning blue lights and red dots, you have an eye test and finally they work out if you’re suitable for treatment.

This is the deciding moment, as not everyone is suitable for treatment, but luckily for me I was and a big smile gleamed across my face.

They advertise from £395 per eye on the TV which is cheap, one of the cheapest around in the UK. However you don’t always get to choose which price plan you’re going to go with; I was unable to have the £395 per eye because of the size of my pupils – they’re huge – so I had to go with the more expensive option at £995 per eye. This is called Wavefront and it’s where the laser measures and corrects every prescription in your eye – giving you perfect vision. The cheaper option, which still gives you DVLA standard vision or better, corrects your vision to one prescription in the same way that glasses or lenses do, so say you’re -2.25 in each eye the laser will correct that one prescription over the whole eye giving you the same level of vision you would get from glasses or lenses.

Now I figured I’m only going to have this done once and I’ll be able to see clearly for the rest of my life, plus the savings on a lifetime supply of glasses and lenses will be huge so it’ll be worth it.

Part of the surgery I had – lasik – involves creating a flap on the front of the eye. There are two ways for this flap to be made … The first is a precision mechanical method where a blade cuts the flap, this option is included in the base price of the laser eye surgery. The second is where the laser makes the flap, which is more accurate and the healing time is quicker, this is called Intralase.

Again, I’m only doing it once, so I opted for the laser to cut my eye at an extra cost of £300 per eye.

Total cost for surgery was around the £2600 mark.

That’s having the very best that today’s technology can give… my eye’s are very important to me, much like yours are to you, so I wanted the best for them. I paid £13 a month for my contact lenses so I worked out that in roughly 16 years time I would have spent that amount of money on lenses alone without the added cost of glasses and sight tests. Plus you can’t really put a price on freedom – I know that lines got more corn than Kellogs but it’s true!

I also got £50 off because my friend recommended me to Optical Express so that paid for the fuel up to Bristol at least! That made the treatment cost roughly £2550.

The closest treatment date was only two weeks away from the initial consultation so I decided to take it and pay the balance there and then.

I don’t know about you but I don’t have a spare £2600 just lying around ready and waiting for me to spend it, so I opted to take out 10 months interest free credit with Optical Express to pay for the treatment. I also paid some in cash and put some on my Virgin Credit Card, which cleverly I transfered the balance of the card into my bank account, before the consultation, so I get interest free for 16 months on that money and it was in my bank account ready and waiting for me to use. In the end I only had to put £900 on Optical Express finance so that is paid off at £90 per month interest free for 10 months. On the Virgin Card, because I did a balance transfer, I get 16 months to pay back that money which is a pretty long time to pay no interest!

Anyway, back to the interesting stuff!

Contact lenses have to be taken out for at least a week prior to the surgery to let the eyes settle back into their natural shape – I didn’t know this but contact lenses change the shape of your eye a little bit with prolonged wear! Having worn contact lenses for around 8 years, I very rarely wore my glasses, infact I had to get new glasses made just for that week so that I could see as I didn’t even own a pair! It was strange wearing glasses again and it was horrible having to move my head in the direction I wanted to look in order to be able to see anything. Add the glare from the sun and lights and it just made me realise how good my sight would be without all this!

The day came, 25th May 2009, me and my girlfriend, Amy, made the two hour journey up to Optical Express in Bristol in record time … about 4 hours because of bank holiday traffic! It was very sloowww. Bristol is the closest Laser Clinic for the south west but there are hundreds of locations all over the UK, and the world for any international readers! The clinic is in the huge Cribbs Causeway shopping centre, which seems strange as in your mind you don’t envisage going into a shopping centre to have your eyes cut, laser corrected, put back together again and then leaving with perfect vision. Very strange indeed.

We arrived for my appointment at 3.30pm and sat patiently in the waiting room. They said we might be there for between 2 and 3 hours. 5 minutes later I was having my eyes measured up again like I had done at the previous consultation to ensure that everything matched up and to do final checks on my eyes. I sat back in the waiting room for literally minutes and it was then time to meet my surgeon. His name was Tom, a friendly New Zealand bloke, who made me feel like I was in good hands. If you have yours done at Bristol, don’t ask him if he’s Australian, he doesn’t like it, and if you do ask him just make sure it’s AFTER the surgery has been done!

He checked the health of my eyes and after a few questions and answers it was back to the waiting room where I found the past patients comments book. I’ve made a little video showing some of the feedback they’d given to Optical Express, there’ll be a link at the bottom of this article. That made me feel even better about the surgery as all these people had come away with such fantastic results! I had a bit of a longer wait this time … about 15 minutes, shock, horror! (I think you can gather that I was being looked after very well and in hardly any time at all.)

It was then time to go in for the operation!

I’d be lying if I said I was nervous, to be honest I wasn’t. Now I know that seems strange but after feeling so secure and well looked after the whole time I didn’t feel any need to feel nervous. I’ve had surgery before and if the testimonials of other people were anything to go by then this was going to be a walk in the park! A nurse came and took me into the operating theatre (it’s not as scary as it sounds) and showed me the various machines that are going to give me perfect vision. She talked through everything that is going to happen and I met the team who would be in control.

I was given a very fetching hair cover hat thing (I can’t think of a proper name for it) and I laid down with my head in a blow up pillow to keep it in place. There’s no sketchy straps or vices to keep your head in place, it’s all very comfortable and you can move your head the whole time. Don’t worry, the laser is guided to where it needs to be so even if you do move it wont make any difference. While you’re there a nurse puts anesthetic drops in your eyes which makes them go completely numb – none of this hurts by the way.

Then it’s time to begin!

The first part of the procedure is to make the flap in each eye. Like I said I opted for the Intralase where a laser cuts the flap. Tom, my surgeon, puts a spongey rubber ring into my numbed eye which stops the eye blinking – it feels like you’re blinking still but you’re not. Then he applies what I can only describe a kind of gasket or suction ring which locks onto the eye – again none of this hurts, you just feel a bit of pressure. Then the laser comes down and you lose all the vision in that eye, for me everything went brown but it can go grey, and all you can see is shadows. At this point the laser does it’s thing, which is to create thousands of tiny bubbles under the cornea which somehow makes the flap. I’m not sure of the technicalities but it works so who cares. The suction thing is taken out of your eye and they do the same to the other eye. Once they’ve done this you are quite literally blind and it’s quite a strange sensation – you can still see shadows, like the shadow of the nurse in your peripheral vision but you can’t actually see anything. It’s not scary just a little bit strange.

They then move you over to the laser which is going to do the magic.

Tom lifts the cornea on my eye, with what looks like some sort of sponge, and massages it around to get rid of the bubbles that the laser produced. When he lifted it up it all I could see was the light flickering across my eye. It’s all very clever stuff indeed! Then the laser comes down and you focus on a red light in the middle, they give you a count down, and the laser works it’s magic to the sound of snap, crackle and pop, some blue lightning-type flashes and a distinct burning smell – which I was reassured was not my eye but was the laser itself. Phew. The cornea flap is put back down, some drops are put into the eye and they cover it over to repeat the process on the other eye. All of this took a maximum of 25 minutes and when it was all over I sat up and could actually see the time on the wall. I couldn’t do this before!

It had worked!

I could see the surgeons face, the nurses face, the logo on my trainers. I was looking through was could only be described as a white haze or mist but already I was able to see clearly and better than I had done before. It was amazing. I left the theatre and went into a waiting room where a nurse showed me what drops I needed to put in my eyes and when. Tom came back out and he checked my eyes one last time, everything was OK and I was sent on my way.

Roughly an hour and a half in a shopping mall gave me perfect vision. It’s amazing.

The next few hours, in all honesty, were quite uncomfortable. To begin with my eyes felt fine, but this was just the anesthetic keeping me from feeling anything, once is started to wear off after half an hour or so, I found it really hard to keep my eyes open as everything was incredibly bright and my eyes were watering a hell of a lot. They were really red as well, mainly from all the different drops that had been put in my eyes. So for the journey home, despite wanting to look at this brand new clear world I had in front of me, I decided to take a nap (as recommended) and as if like magic when I woke up a couple hours later I was able to keep my eyes open and the haziness had subsided almost completely. Over the course of the evening my vision continued to improve, the haziness was completely gone by bed time (around 11pm) and I could happily sit and watch TV just a few hours after the operation.

I applied the three different eye drops throughout the evening and finally went to bed with some protective goggles on and a huge smile. It took me a while to actually fall asleep though as I was noticing all the little things in the room I’d never noticed before having not slept in glasses or contacts!

The next morning I woke up feeling great. My eyes didn’t hurt at all, they felt slightly heavy but I think that was mainly to do with the fact that my eyes always feel heavy in the mornings. I looked over at Amy and I could actually see her face clearly, I could see the picture on the wall and I could see the time without having to squint like a lunatic!

This was amazing!

I took the goggles off, put some more drops in my eyes, and looked out the window – I could see the trees, the birds, the sea, the sun, the clouds, the cars, the neighbour cutting her lawn. I could see all this before but only as one big blur! My eyes weren’t bright red anymore, all that was there was the bruising (which looks like big popped blood vessels) around the cornea, this doesn’t hurt but it just looks painful, it really isn’t. Oh and the marks from the goggles, I think I had them on a bit to tight!

My follow up appointment with Optical Express was at 9.50am that morning so I got myself and my new eyes ready and headed on over. I was told not to drive but to be honest I could have easily driven, my vision had never been so clear! They checked my eyes and gave me a quick eye test. All was fine. In-fact it was better than fine. 20/20 vision is being able to read up to a certain line on the sight chart. I was easily able to read that. The man at the clinic then gave me a lower line to read, now if I could read that then I’d have better than 20/20 vision. It was so easy it was unreal – not only that but I asked him if there was any smaller so I could really show off. I could read the lowest line they have on the chart which is two lower than where 20/20 vision is. Does that make me super human?!?

I reckon it does!

And that’s it. I’m writing this one day after surgery, I was classed as super human this morning and my vision is absolutely perfect. I’ve been putting drops in my eyes all day which make them feel nice and keeps them healing well. I’ve got no pain. No gritty feeling. The only thing I have is lights are very bright and have a sort of halo around them, but this is normal and should disappear as my eyes heal over the next few weeks. Apart from the red bruises around the eyes everything is great. I’m back at work tomorrow, although to be fair I could have gone back today, and I’ve been driving around, watching TV, writing this, walking my dog – all without contact lenses or glasses.

So would I recommend laser eye surgery?

I think you can work that out for yourself.

Thanks for reading.