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NEWS

For as long as she can remember, Joanne Churchill hated wearing glasses. She tried contact lenses, but found them only marginally better. Then she discovered laser eye surgery. She tells Emma Joseph about her life changing experience.

Every morning when she wakes up, Joanne Churchill reverts back to the age of her eight-year-old twins, screaming with delight at how clearly she can see.

Just four months ago the 35-year-old mother of two was constantly suffering red, itchy eyes caused by the fluff from the dogs she grooms getting under her lenses and every year bought ‘boring’ prescription sunglasses for summer holidays.

Then after a lifetime of loathing her glasses and contact lenses, she underwent laser eye surgery, an experience that changed her life forever.

She now has bright, white eyes, can see perfectly and has even treated herself to a pair of ‘J-Lo sunglasses’.

‘As soon as I heard about laser eye surgery I wanted it,’ said Joanne, who lives in Brownhill Road, Chandler’s Ford, with her husband Ashley and twin daughters, Holly and Jasmine.

‘It took me a good year to go through with it, because I’ve got two children and you do feel a bit selfish – what if it went wrong? Could I put myself through it?

‘But mainly it was finding someone to go to. I wrote off to the adverts on the TV, but I knew I would never go there.’

It was at a children’s birthday party that Joanne got talking to a nurse and found out about a man called Rob Morris, who worked performing laser eye surgery at the Wessex Nuffield Hospital.

‘I went along to an evening seminar and I was just sold,’ she said.

‘This was the man, I was going to have it done. I was so excited, I’d wanted it so badly and I’d had a whole year of thinking about it.’

Just a month after she attended the seminar, Joanne was booked in for her surgery appointment.

‘I very nearly ran away,’ she remembers. ‘Because you’re awake and watching, you’ve got to look at it, which is a bit gut-wrenching.
‘But I was shocked at how quick it was. You go in, they put some anaesthetic drops in your eyes, they put a clamp on your eye to keep it open, they put you on a machine that zaps your eye for a couple of seconds and then it’s done.

‘I was in there for about 5 minutes for both eyes.’

After the procedure, Joanne was advised to keep her eyes covered while she travelled home, and then to lay down for a couple of hours in the dark, with her eyes closed.

Then came the moment of truth.

‘When I got up it was instant. I was screaming like a little girl, there was no pain at all.

‘Every morning now when I wake up and it’s so bright and I can see everything, it’s even better than when I had glasses. It’s a miracle.

‘I don’t regret it at all.’

Consultant ophthalmologist Rob Morris, who carried out Joanne’s procedure, is quick to point out that laser eye surgery is not a miracle cure for everyone.

He said: ‘Laser eye surgery is one form of treatment option available to people who are wishing to become less dependent on spectacles.

‘In Joanne’s case she had a form of treatment called LASIK, in which a small, superficial cut is made on the cornea – the clear bit on the front of the eye – then you put the laser treatment on the eye.’

Mr Morris added that the surgery worked because it changed the shape of the cornea.

‘When light comes into the eye it gets bent to focus a point. When it focuses on the back of the eye, people can see well, but if it focuses on the front of the eye then they get a blurred image.

‘When you laser the cornea you flatten it so that light focuses at the point at the back of the eye to make things clearer.’

SOUTHERN DAILY ECHO - JULY 1st 2003