Have you ever wondered how life is going for all those people who have undergone laser eye surgery? Do they lead the same professional, social, sports activities as before? Or do they live completely different lives and make passionate use of their newfound visual comfort?
We know from experience that life after laser vision correction, when you regain full visual comfort, never returns to the state before the procedure. Changes occur in at least three areas of life: in the performance of daily routines, in sports activities and in careers.
The daily life of eyeglasses wearers, especially those with high vision defects, is a whole list of minor and major inconveniences that can really make life miserable. Without glasses, a person is simply helpless – he won’t read the number of an oncoming bus, the price on the shelf overhead, he won’t get into the shower, he won’t recognize a friend on the street. When the irritation of this helplessness reaches its zenith, the eyeglass wearer switches to contact lenses. Lenses do indeed give incomparably better visual comfort, but when you use them, you have to strictly follow hygiene rules. People who have a problem with drying out of the mucous membrane of the eye will quickly feel discomfort from – as it were – a foreign body in the eyes. If you wear daily lenses, you need to throw them away every day. If biweekly – remember to replace them (and take them off every night…) every two weeks, and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, it often happens that we do not take off the lenses at night, or instead of two weeks we use them for a month. If we do this at least once and nothing happens, we think we can repeat such a lens breakout. Only that it’s a simple way to serious infections and even damage to the eyes.
It’s equally difficult to play sports when you have vision problems. Swimming, skiing or playing soccer with glasses? If a person persists, all this is possible, but what about the pleasure – not to mention the achievements. Of course, we can again swap glasses for contact lenses, but in the case of water sports, for example, wearing contacts risks infections or washing the lenses out of the eye.
All the time we are talking about amateur sports activity, because if it comes to competitive, professional sports, it is necessary to remember that, for example, high myopia is for an athlete not only the discomfort associated with blurred distance vision, but also the risk of retinal detachment or its degenerative and atrophic changes. People with high myopia should avoid excessive physical exertion combined with fluctuations in intraocular pressure or optokinetic nystagmus (occurs when viewing fast-moving objects). For more information, see the article titled “Treatment of vision defects in athletes.”
So when laser vision correction frees us from the need to wear corrective glasses or contact lenses, we can not only take real pleasure in those sports we’ve done before – only that we’re still fighting the matter, but also throw ourselves into new experiences, such as scuba diving or skydiving.
We can also take a nap without worrying about breaking our glasses or irritating our eyes and damaging our contact lenses.
And last, although not least, our professional activity. Certainly, freedom from glasses and contact lenses will be appreciated by a surgeon, a car mechanic, a chef, a pilot, a professional driver… In all of the above-mentioned professions, visual acuity is crucial if you want to perform your duties perfectly without endangering yourself and your customers. Think also of all those people who work for hours at the computer. Eye fatigue, headaches, blurred vision and dry eyes are common ailments associated with prolonged screen use, also known as digital eye fatigue.
Both eyeglass wearers and contact lens wearers suffer from them – they probably even more so.
In 2012 alone, some 35 million laser vision correction procedures were performed worldwide. Almost half of these (about 17 million) were performed in the US. In the UK, laser vision correction is the third most commonly performed surgical procedure (source: Market Scope 2012). These numbers are increasing year after year.
Many people opt for vision correction just to improve their own image. This is what celebrities, actresses, singers, famous athletes do.
For ordinary people, achieving full visual comfort means that they can work freely and lead an active social life. That they don’t worry that if they lose consciousness, no one will take care to remove their contact lenses properly, and when they have an accident, they will wake up in the hospital without seeing what’s going on around them.
Laser vision correction is simply a quantum leap to freedom !
