I’m off tomorrow to have my eyes worked on with Lasik. I may still have to have reading glasses (damn!), but I hope to be free of the glasses and contact lenses that I’ve had to wear since I was young boy. There are some risks, of course, but what else is new? There are also benefits, like not having to grope around blindly in the morning for my glasses (which my cats frequently knock off the nightstand, anyway), not being afraid of falling asleep in my contacts (or worse, falling asleep in my contacts and dealing with painful dried out eyes afterward), being able to swim without having my lenses float off, and so on. I love modern technological capitalism.
It’s hard to really give capitalism credit for all the modern advances in refractive surgery. RK was developed in the Soviet Union, ALK was developed in Columbia, and LASIK was developed in Greece.
In any event, good luck with the surgery and I hope everything goes well.
That’s true, but the question is, where will you find the wealth to make technological advances widely available? The Soviet Union was able to mobilize scientists to make astonishing things, but not the wealth to make those that were of value to consumers widely available. That’s why I mentioned my love for “modern technological capitalism.”
Yeeehaaa! Well, it was a bit uncomfortable, but my vision is getting much better (and should be even better by tomorrow morning, after a night of sleep and healing). I am very pleased already. (And it’s actually a certainty that I’ll need reading glasses, but I will be free of glasses and contacts for everything else.) It may be too early to say for sure what impact this will have on me, but so far I’m quite pleased.
This is something I might do later in life–like maybe when I get a job with an insurance policy that covers this. I wear contacts, but, my eyes dry out too easily; so I rarely wear them for more than a couple hours at a time.
I do seem to remember Virginia Postrel writing about her experience–she seemed to say that right off everything was great, but then she kept on having to go back for these “touch up” procedures, and spent many hours in the waiting room waiting for all of those subsequent appointments.