It's was 11:00 o'clock in the morning when I entered the Fresno Surgical hospital and the friendly front-desk assistant ask me for my I.D and medical insurance information. In the past 2 weeks, I've been complaining about seeing a strong glare from both of my eyes and I was afraid that my cataracts had retuned again, which had permanently damaged my left eye with a few blind spots, but now the situation has gone worse because I couldn't make out the words anymore in my Business-10 textbook and I reluctantly had to switch back to my reading glasses. "You have a smudge on your lens..Cruz" said Dr. Remington, a renown specialized Ophthalmologist from the California Eye Institute...and yes...he accepts Medicare! then he said, "Let's set up an appointment to clear them up...you'll see a lot better."
I didn't have a clue what took place in a eye-lens cleanse, but to be quite frankly, I was a little jittery about the entire process especially when it comes to a laser beam being shot up inside my eyeballs. Well, there I was sitting in the patient's chair with my chin pressed against the end of a laser telescopic camera. "Is this going to burn?" I asked thinking that a long beam of light was going to penetrate my eyeball like some Star-Trek movie. "Not a bit" said Dr. Remington "This will only take a few minutes." "A few minutes!" I thought, "What's he talking about?...this is laser surgery not a damm haircut!" Then suddenly I heard a few crackling noises like the sound of a Police taser gun, but at a lower tone and after a few zaps..here and there...I was all done. Besides seeing a few floaters hanging around in my vision sight, which is routine after these type of surgeries, I was perfectly fine and actually this whole eye-lens cleaning procedure was entirely painless. In fact, by the time I got home, which was only 10 minutes away, I was able to see through walls and buildings, in fact, the combination to the Wells Fargo safe is...Ahhh...just kidding...but anyway my right eye went back to 20/20 vision and I was even able to see out of my damaged left eye! You ask..was I able to read my Business-10 textbook when I got home? Well.. now I'm teaching the class...what does that tell you!
Laser ( Light Amplification by Simulated Emission of Radiation) technology has come a long way since co-inventer Arthur Schawlow first worked on a concentrated beam of light in 1960, where a patent war between several participating inventors including Schawlow occurred that took over thirty years to resolve because they were all aware of its money-making potential, and now the world of laser technology has spread throughout the entire world in almost every aspect of human production. From revolutionizing the communication realm with the help of fiber optics came the invention of the computer where modern laser technology have connected us to the internet-network and TV channels. Laser technology has also improved the commerce and entertainment market with the supermarket checkout scanners, CD's, DVD's, laser printers and security holograms on credit cards, but the biggest breakthrough of modern laser is the benefit of pain free eye-surgery. which has greatly induced the needs of general anesthesia and invasive eye surgery.
In fact, laser eye surgery has become such a precise and specialized medical field that it's end results of miracle cures have been broken down into several isolated categories, for instance, Beley-Femtosecond laser treatment, which is used to reshape the cornea tissue and improve eye-vision. Lasiks laser treatment used to correct near and far sightedness. Laser Thermal Keratoplasty treatment-for far-sighted vision.
Recently, advanced science have made new discoveries with the aid of laser technology, for instance, the studies of atomic physics and chemistry where laser beams act like "optical tweezers" to manipulate biological samples such as red blood cells and microorganisms. What seems so very hard to believe is the successful advanced stages between the ancient testing of the very first laser ray of the 1960's to the current role of painless eye surgery, which in reality has only been a very short path of 56 progressive years, but to what extent is to become of human technology in the next 50 years? Will there still be a dominant market of a Laser World or will there be another creator such as Arthur Schawlow in the near future with the next invention of human miracles like...uhh... maybe... perhaps...Time-Travel? Hmm...it makes me wonder!
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