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January 23, 2006
My Lasik Story - Before LASIK Surgery
It now is about one year since I had my Lasik Treatment through a local surgeon. And I must say that during the past year I am continually reminded of the watershed day that I actually changed my vision, permanently.
But let me start at the beginning and backtrack somewhat into what my world was like before having Lasik performed on both eyes.
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I started needing and wearing glasses when I was twelve-years-old. That was during the mid 1970's so as you can (now) imagine through recalling the fashion industry back then, that wasn't a pretty sight. Especially for a pre-pubescent boy.
Needless to say, I didn't exactly have to beat off the girls with a stick to keep them from approaching me.
My glasses fulfilled that purpose all too well.
Okay, off my soapbox.
I continued to wear spectacles for the next three decades, exactly. And through that time my vision worsened from just a simple 'sharpening of the words on the distant blackboard at the front of the classroom' to an outright correction for a severely debilitating case of extreme myopia.
In simple laymen's (and laywomen's) terms - I had became very, very nearsighted as I grew up, and my eyeballs stretched to heretofore unseen limits along with my tall slender body therein causing my complete dependency on spectacles to function in the physical world.
At the end of it all, somewhere in my late twenties, my vision had stabilized at around 20/900 in my left eye and 20/750 in my right eye, with both eyes having a modicum of astigmatisum. But at the end of it all I had the ubiquitous 'coke-bottle bottom' glasses and needed this amount of correction to function throughout my days.
I hadn't discovered contacts until I was in my early twenties, but when I wasn't wearing them I had to use my glasses to help me to see. No matter where I was during my waking hours I needed some sort of visual correction to help me see the world like 'normally-sighted' people did.
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Okay, so let me give you some example of how bad my actual condition was.
- The only place I didn't wear glasses or contacts to correct my vision was during my hours sleeping. Fortunately, my dreams were always perfectly corrected; otherwise that would've been an extreme bummer.
- I had an actual distance of clarity that extended, literally, only about eight, yes - 8, inches in front of my face. If I ever tried to read a book without wearing glasses or contacts I looked like one of those nerds one sees in the Hollywood movies who has to move the book back and forth in front of his/her face to read each line; akin to the old fashioned manual typewriters that always had to be pulled back to the beginning of each line.
- I could not walk properly without glasses on as I had no depth perception. If I tried to walk up stairs I would trip as I couldn't properly judge how far the next higher step was from me. I, fortunately, never tried walking down a set of stairs without visual correction in place. That would've been plain stupid in my case. Besides, I had other stupid things I could do that weren't potentially physically damaging to this 200lb carcass I'm housed in.
- As a literal example let me give you this written picture. Imagine a humongous drawing of a person's face on a building wall that was several hundred feet, say, 800 hundred feet, off in the distance. Now, you have 20/20 vision - perfect vision - so you can see the drawing perfectly clearly and are able to decipher that the drawing is of a woman. I, however, cannot even begin to figure out what the drawing consists of until I walk almost right up to it. And even then I'm still not able to see it clearly because it is so huge, but I can tell that it is a picture of a face. And maybe if I squint enough I can tell that it is a woman's face.
Anyway, I trust you have a good picture of what the world of a person dependent upon corrective lenses is like.
Now, let me share with you what happened as I grew older.
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As I stated before, my vision continued to worsen until I was in my late twenties. But when I was in my early twenties I started, out of vanity, to wear soft contact lenses. I could never wear hard contact lenses as they made my eyes feel like I had a toenail stuck in them. Not good.
Continuing...I wore contact lenses for the next twenty years and everything was seeming to go alright with them in lieu of wearing glasses. About ten years ago I discovered disposable contact lenses that I would wear for two weeks and then throw away.
But what happened to my relationship with contacts was that over the years I went from being able to wear them 18 hours a day to only being able to wear them for 8 hours. And even then those eight hours were filled with considerable discomfort - burning, itching, watering, and unclear vision.
Over a period of several months I continued to visit my opthomologist and my contact lenses dispenser in an effort to figure out what was going on. After trying different lenses, prescription drops, and abstaining from wearing contacts for a number of weeks, they finally figured out I had what was called Giant Papillary Conjunctivitis. In other words, the underside of my eyelids were infected and resisting accepting me wearing anything on my eyeballs.
Essentially, every time I blinked my eyelids were scraping across my contacts and over a period of twenty years they stopped liking doing that. So what they did was build up hundreds of small bumps and callouses so as to irritate me every time I blinked while wearing my contact lenses. That, in effect, was what was causing my severe physical irritation and discomfort during my wearing of contact lenses.
And I was told that it wouldn't go away until I stopped wearing contact lenses for a certain period of time, perhaps up to several years.
Well, to say the least, this didn't bode well with me. Here I was with incredibly poor vision and I'm told that I have to rely on only wearing glasses to function in daily life. Well, what I found out during those several weeks of wearing glasses during that contact lenses problem-solving period was that the smallest mis-alignment of my coke-bottle-bottom glasses would cause minor sinus headaches and discomfort.
Essentially, I really was in a no-win type of situation. I could continue wearing contacts with discomfort all while wearing them during the workday. Or I could wear only glasses all day long with discomfort all the time.
There had to be another solution.
There was. And I was about to discover it.
Continue reading to: My Lasik Story - After LASIK Surgery
Written by Andre Best
President, Ultimate Results, Inc.
http://www.andrebest.com
'Learn About Life From Another Perspective'
(Author's permission is granted to share this full article with others. Just leave the signature line intact, please.)
Posted by Andre Best at 6:02 AM | Comments (0)
January 4, 2006
An Awful Waste of (Outer) Space
I remember reading this analogy of just how big the cosmos is and how we can't be so conceited to think that we're alone in all of it.
The example went something like this...
Imagine that the Sun is a grain of sand and that the Earth is an imperceptibly smaller grain of matter circling around that small grain of sand.
Got the picture? Good. Let's continue.
Now, scientists calculate that the Milky Way Galaxy, of which our solar system is an active part of, contains 100 billion solar systems. Each of these solar systems has its own sun and own planets and/or moons and/or spherical entities circling around it.
Now, scientists also calculate that space contains 100 billion galaxies that are like the Milky Way Galaxy.
So where does this leave us? Well, let's do the math.
100 billion solar systems multiplied by 100 billion galaxies amounts to a number so big that there is no name for it, according to the scientists coming up with these numbers.
Now, this is where things get really cool...
So, just what would this number that is so big that it doesn't have a name look like if we were to make it a real-life situation? Well, remember that analogy of the Sun being a grain of sand?
Well, how many grains of sand would 100 billion multiplied by 100 billion amount to?
Answer: It would be enough sand to cover the surface of the Earth, yes - the entire surface of the Earth, three-feet deep with sand.
Can you imagine that?
Take your eyes off of your computer and look off through a window into the distance. Now imagine that distance being covered with three feet of sand, just like at the beach. Now imagine that sand covering the entire Earth.
Whoa.
That's big.
Now, do you think it's still reasonable to think that we're alone in all this cosmos and blackness of space?
We won't know for sure until if/when we have our own version of 'Independence Day' and the extraterrestrials show up in our backyard.
But it's a neat concept isn't it?
So, the next time your kids ask you, like my three boys take turns periodically asking me, 'Daddy, is there other people out there in space?' - now you know how to answer them.
Or you can just answer like the line from that great Carl Sagan SETI-inspired movie 'Contact' and respond to them 'Well, if we are the only ones, it would be an awful waste of space, wouldn't it?'
May the force be with you.
Later.
Written by Andre Best
President, Ultimate Results, Inc.
http://www.andrebest.com
'Learn About Life From Another Perspective'
(Author's permission is granted to share this full article with others. Just leave the signature line intact, please.)
Posted by Andre Best at 8:46 PM | Comments (1)