I was diagnosed as being myopic in third grade. I felt I had done something horribly wrong and was being punished by having to wear glasses.

I really disliked my first pair of glasses. The frames were clear plastic with pink decorative “swooshes” on top.

I solved the problem of not liking to wear glasses by only wearing them when I actually needed to see something clearly in the distance. That meant that when I forgot to take my glasses with me to the movie theater, I squinted all the way through.

When eye correction surgery became really popular in the 1990s, I wasn’t tempted, even though I knew someone who worked for a company that made LASIK equipment.

It just sounds too grisly for me: with only a mild sedative and anesthetic eye drops, a corneal suction ring is applied to the eye to hold it in place. Then the machine cuts a flap in the cornea, reshapes the cornea and repositions the flap.

What could go wrong with that? How about significant vision impairment, such as starbursts, ghosting, halos and double vision?

Eye correction surgery expensive and has become a lucrative business for ophthalmologists.

My family has a history of glaucoma and macular degeneraton, so I try to have my eyes checked by an ophthalmologist on a regular basis.

When we moved to Colorado Springs, I struggled mightily to find an ophthalmologist that didn’t do LASIK surgery, but failed. I ended up making an appointment with an ophthalmologist everyone recommended who acted like I was wasting his time because I didn’t want LASIK surgery.

When you’ve invested big bucks in LASIK equipment problems like glaucoma and macular degeneration just aren’t very interesting.