Amanda, a Senior Paramedic from Manchester received free laser eye surgery as part of our ‘Thanks a Million’ campaign. The campaign is dedicated to donating £1 million of laser eye surgery to those who work in the NHS & Emergency Services to thank them for the important work that they do.

After working as a paramedic for almost 16 years, Amanda found that her vision was progressively getting worse the older she got. Like many of our patients, Amanda learned the difficulties of wearing glasses with facemasks during the COVID-19 pandemic, and so she turned to contact lenses for her vision correction. However, even with contact lenses, working long 12-hour shifts and having to wear them for over 14 hours a day, Amanda found that she was growing more irritated and that  by the end of the day her contact lenses were causing her eyes to become “dry and sore”. 

Finding her poor vision “massively inconvenient” at work, Amanda grew increasingly frustrated with her short-sightedness and this played a major factor in her painful eye strain. As well as this, she also found herself in dangerous situations in work due to her poor eyesight. One example being after she was called out to help a patient having a cardiac arrest, Amanda’s glasses fell off and she had to stop what she was doing in order to clean and dry her glasses and put them back on, further influencing her choice to have laser eye surgery.

Researching vision correction surgery options, Amanda came across the Optical Express ‘Thanks a Million’ campaign. Speaking to colleagues who had also previously had laser eye surgery Amanda was quick to sign up for the opportunity of free laser eye surgery and was told she would “never look back” after having surgery.

Speaking on her experience at Optical Express, Amanda said that from the initial consultation to the day of surgery she was completely “put at ease”. She was made fully informed of the process at every single stage, which meant that the actual surgery itself went “exactly as expected” and the team were “absolutely brilliant”.

Speaking to us just 24-hours after her laser eye surgery procedure, Amanda felt “like brand-new”, commenting that the transformation in her vision was already life-changing for her. Amanda is now looking forward to not having to wear contact lenses and can’t wait not to have to struggle putting them in in the morning or having to take them out at night!