Nerd Rock

Too lazy to write anything properly lately so I’ll recycle this “How cool shit works” article I wrote for Trinity News 4 years ago. It’s about Laser Eye Surgery. Reading over it again it made me laugh in some parts but mostly cringe deeply that I could ever publish such waffly non-sequitir nonsense. Can’t say I’ve learnt much since.

Glasses, they can make you appear smarter than you really are, can conceal your secret superhero identity and in truly desperate times can be used to persuade people not to hit you in the face. One thing they are not though, is cool. Over the years, people have tried ways to overcome the need to wear their spectacles. These solutions include the successful contact lenses and the not so successful “stumble around blindly”. Recently however, clever people have combined several cool things such as “burning things with a laser” and “being able to see things far away” to produce LASER EYE SURGERY! “But Tom, shining lasers in your eyes is dangerous, a smart spectacled person told me!” I hear you say. Not true, let me explain…

To first have laser eye surgery one must have an eye defect (yes, I was surprised too). Although there are many different eye disorders, laser surgery works best for myopia. Myopia (also called short sightedness) affects your ability to see things far away but you can read and see close things fine. This is caused by bad focusing in your eye. In myopia, the bad focus is usually caused by an eyeball that is too long. The eye has two parts that focus stuff. These are the cornea and the lens. The cornea forms part of a natural bulging curve in front of your pupils (if you don’t believe me have a feel but wipe your hands on your jeans first). The rest of the focusing is done by the lens. The lens is adjustable by tiny muscles that we see as the iris (aka “the colourdy bit”). The principle behind modern laser eye surgery is that the cornea is reshaped by laser so it focuses images correctly. This reshaping technique works best on myopia but can also work on near sightedness and astigmatism (having a funny cornea shape, probably caused by too much eye gouging).

Although this may all sounds easy, “reshaping” the eye is a delicate process. Several tests must be done to check the eye shape is within a workable range and so they know where they need to point the laser! The laser used to reshape the eye is literally a “cool laser”. It produces no heat except on the tiny area it is focused and by tiny I mean smaller than a baby weasel! Some laser beams can focus to a space of 0.25 microns. That means it could slice a single hair from the aforementioned weasel into 200 very thin wispy weasel hairs!

However, although most people report a huge improvement in vision it is rare that perfect vision is restored. The surgery has the advantage of being very quick and anaesthetic eye drops make it painless. Surgery itself normally takes about 15 minutes and you can return to normal googling, gazing and glancing in a day or two. Problems after surgery are quite rare but mainly include difficulty with lights or blurry, hazy vision. These problems can normally be fixed by another surgery or ironically, by wearing prescription lenses.

With so many people jumping on this lucrative bandwagon, it is important that if you are interested in getting this surgery that you go to a recognised, certified professional. In Ireland the procedure, pre and postoperative care add up to around €2500. With that kind of price tag, laser surgery is not for everyone. You might be better off saving your money for other cool things like an electric guitar or a giant glow-in-the-dark yeti figure. Make up your own minds! Until next time, stay cool amigos…