Suffering from poor vision, Keith was forced to rely on both glasses and contact lenses for over 30 years. Finding the care regime that came with wearing hard lenses to be an inconvenience, he switched to daily disposables but struggled with the ongoing cost and the plastic waste that resulted from them.

When he also learned that he had an early-stage cataract in his left eye, he decided that it was time to opt for an alternative vision correction solution and booked in for multifocal lens replacement surgery at Optical Express.

“There might not seem to be many [contact lenses] from me, but by the time you multiply that by millions of people, obviously it’s a plastics issue that needs addressing. I was an Environmental Manager so, obviously, the environmental impacts are important and every little bit that everybody can do is going to reduce that impact,” he says. Also noticing that the cataract in his left eye had started to impact his perception of colour, he was keen to opt for a solution that could correct his vision and simultaneously remove the early-stage cataract: “If I want to continue driving then I thought, now is the time to get it sorted out.”

As Keith had never previously received surgery of any kind, he felt slightly nervous in the run-up to his appointment. Not knowing what to expect of the procedure, he was surprised to find that it had been both quick and completely pain-free. “Not at any point could I say there was any pain at all. And before you knew it, it was done. It was an extremely good, seamless operation,” he comments.

Throughout his journey with Optical Express, Keith has been continuously impressed with both the team at our Chelmsford clinic and his surgeon, Dr Kazakos. “Absolutely excellent, I can’t give any more applause other than he did what he needed to do brilliantly and here I am a day later with 20|20 vision or better. By the end, I was calling him a magician! It’s very, very good,” he says.

Opting for multifocal lenses means that Keith now enjoys exceptional distance and near vision, allowing him to live life with complete visual freedom: “The balance of the prescription is absolutely spot on. Up until recently, I was an athletics coach and official. I used to have to take my glasses on and off when I was officiating on the long jump because I was having to read close then put them on so that I could actually see the jumps, it’s just totally inconvenient.”

Over the moon with his restored vision, Keith wouldn’t hesitate to recommend lens replacement surgery to others struggling with outdated vision correction solutions such as glasses and contact lenses. “I would recommend Optical Express implicitly without a problem. Everything that they’ve done has been professional, good value, and informative. The bottom line is, to use the old Hackney expression, ‘They do what it says on the tin’,” he comments.