I went to hug my wife at a pool... and it wasn’t her!
Our writer knew he had to undergo laser eye surgery when...
MY ‘EUREKA’ moment came when I was splashing about in the Mount Wolseley swimming pool outside Tullow in Co. Carlow, and I spied my wife and two small daughters emerging f rom the changing room and slipping into the warm waters.
I grinned and waved jovially as I waded purposely towards them until, about two metres f rom corralling them i nto a group hug, I realised their terrified faces did not belong to my wife and daughters.
I froze and babbled my apologies; the emergence of my actual wife and daughters a few moments later came as much relief to us all.
Fast forward a couple of months and, in consequence of that myopic moment, I find myself flat on my back in Newbridge, Co. Kildare, with a South African ophthalmic s urgeon stooping overhead, zapping my blurry blue eyeballs with a laser beam.
The operation is called iDesign iLASIK laser eye surgery, the operators were Optical Express and the outcome has been to utterly reaffirm my belief that miracles are still entirely possible in this world.
I don’t know when I started to become short-sighted. As a boy I remember the luminous star stickers on my bed at night seemed to be losing their shine, but maybe I was just losing my ability to see them?
My parents took me to see an optician when I was ten. I think he fancied my mum. After examining her eyes, he told her she had ‘perfect eyes’ in such a way that my father still bristles 40 years later. He didn’t seem to think much of my own eyes. Having inspected them with a magnifying glass, he told me I needed to walk the dogs more and read less.
At the age of 12, I called upon Dr Daniel Casey, a diminutive and enchanting man who ran a practice on Wellington Quay near the Ha’penny Bridge in Dublin.
I recall it as a marvellously Dickensian workshop replete with machinery that possibly ran on steam and coal. With my chin resting on a strap of bronze, I watched as Dr Casey flipped lenses in front of my eyes and asked me to read the distant letters.
It felt vaguely like a wrong answer might earn me a bop on the pupil so I hedged my bets, made some of them up and was duly prescribed with my first pair of spectacles.
IWAS never great with spectacles. Their shape did not suit my clumsy existence. Two legs, two lenses, two spring hinges, two rim screws, two nose pads, one bridge, one frame — 12 gadgets attached to the end of my nose. It was only a matter of time before one of them went.
And when they did snap — inevitably and frequently — I would try to stick them together again with Sellotape, lollipop sticks, bailer twine and whatever else came to hand.
I tried contact lenses. In the beginning these were hard lenses — tiny glasses the size of a raindrop that basically sat on your iris and reinforced your vision. They worked brilliantly but my problem was access. Hard lenses had to be removed nightly.
This involved 10-15 minutes of facial acrobatics involving palms, fingertips and cheekbones until the lens unexpectedly popped out and disappeared onto the floor. A panic-fuelled search ensued until the lens was relocated. It was often on my shoulder all along. Sometimes it hadn’t even fallen out. I just thought it had. And then, that done, it was time to start on the other eye.
Putting them in was no easier. Try pointing your finger at your eyeball and pushing it closer and closer until you touch your pupil. Landing the Mars Pathfinder on an asteroid springs to mind. Eyeballs don’t like this sort of thing. That’s why they learned how to blink and close and grew lashes and brows. Eyeballs are very sensitive entities and inserting lenses is a major assault on their comfort zone.
I later tried soft or gas permeable lenses but to me these seemed just like hard lenses, only bigger, and kind of like those fish you get in Christmas crackers that flap and furl and tell you about your love life. The lens always seemed to do a back-flip at the last moment or, worse, it would make a sudden dive into the cornea and vanish, leaving me to stare at myself like an Alfred Hitchcock villain.
Removing lenses was also not conducive to my general bedtime routine during my student years and so I increasingly reverted to wearing spectacles. As a rave enthusiast during that period I would s ometimes remove my glasses while dancing and let myself drift; everything became like an impressionist painting as I floated in my own world of haze. Fast-forward to 2015 when I find myself nearly a decade into married life with two rapidly growing daughters. My vision has not deteriorated but it is still dependent on a concoction of glass and wire attached to my face.
What if I could not find my specs at a critical moment? What if baddies tried to take my wife and children hostage and I could not protect them because I could not see? What if we were swimming in the sea and I didn’t see the shark fins coming? What if I were in a pool and thought three strangers were my wife and children?
And so it was that my dear wife All y booked me in f or an appointment with Optical Express one day after my 43rd birthday.
The initial check up was a simple business. I placed my chin on a rest while a woman in black puff-tested my eyeballs. I’d lately written a story about Napoleon’s spectacles and I thought of the fallen Emperor as a robotic camera took 12,000 images of my eye in a split second.
THE results? Minus 5 in the right eye (with astigmatism thrown in), minus 4.5 in the left. That meant I was eligible for laser eye surgery or, more specifically, iDesign iLASIK, a vision correction procedure 100 per cent customized to my own eyeballs.
A laser beam would reshape the surface of my two corneas and thereby improve my vision. The operation was to be conducted on the cutting edge Visx Star S4 IR excimer laser platform. It would cost €5,590 but I could claim back between 15 and 25 per cent, depending on who I was insured by.
I took a straw-poll among my Facebook friends as to whether I should go ahead and the response was a resounding ‘Aye’.
‘ Eye surgery is so painless. They just use eye drops to numb you — not even a needle! Much easier than the dentist!’ was one serene reply. ‘I know three people who’ve had it and it’s changed their life entirely!,’ voiced another. ‘There’ll be no looking back, arf arf,’ one joked.
Two further consultations with Optical Express followed. I came armed with a notebook stuffed with questions for anyone I met.
Will my tear ducts dry up? Will my eye sensitivity change? What are the side effects? Will I still need to wear reading glasses in order to compare prices on a supermarket shelf? Will I still be able to look up and see Galaxy Andromeda? My questions were met with reassuringly bored answers. It was clear this operation had been performed many times before. I had also run out of reasons not to have it done.