With a prescription of -30 in her left eye and -23 in her right eye, Gayle struggled with severely impaired vision for most of her life. A result of progressive myopia, which causes eyesight to deteriorate year after year, she found that everyday activities such as driving had become increasingly difficult. When myopia also caused her to develop cataracts at a relatively young age, Gayle knew that something had to be done to prevent a rapid decline in her quality of life.

“For 42 years I wore contact lenses and for 50 years I wore glasses, but as I got older, it was progressive myopia, so it went downhill quite quickly, to the point where I developed cataracts quite early,” she explains. “It just made it virtually impossible to see on peripheral vision, and I struggled with driving,” she continues. With her situation worsening rapidly, Gayle’s first thought was to seek cataract surgery through the NHS, but she quickly realised that she would face long waiting times and wouldn’t be able to get her vision corrected at the same time: “I suddenly realised that it wouldn’t necessarily correct my vision, and due to the high prescription I thought, if I’m going to have it done after all these years, if I can have the vision corrected, that would be great.”

Gayle finally decided to book a free consultation at Optical Express and received life-changing lens replacement surgery just 6 weeks later. She was treated by renowned surgeon Dr Aasheet Desai, and was delighted to learn that she had achieved 20|20 vision just 24 hours after surgery. “I’ve got a high prescription, plus these two cataracts, and he said ‘I’ll do my best for you, Gayle’, and he did, as I say, it’s absolutely marvellous,” she comments. “When they took the shields off, I was above driving distance the very next day, which was just mind blowing,” she continues.

In the days following surgery, Gayle was in awe of the small details that she could now pick up: “The one thing for me that stood out, because we live out in the country, is that I could see every branch on the tree, every leaf on the tree, it was just amazing. And not even close up, at a distance. It was like the blades of the grass, individual ones with the drops, it was just amazing. I couldn’t stop looking and I still can’t, to be honest with you.”

Over the moon with being able to see without glasses and contact lenses for the first time since she was 10 years old, Gayle wouldn’t hesitate to recommend lens replacement surgery to anyone who is considering it. “They talk you through every step of the way, they have the facts, you get the information on the surgeon, you get the facts on how many operations they’ve done, the success rate, there’s people you can talk to about it, just yeah, I would definitely recommend them. I feel fantastic, I’m just on cloud nine, it’s brilliant,” she says.