I've been out of commission for the past week, recovering from laser eye surgery. I've been close to blind since I was a little girl, wearing bottle-thick eyeglasses since I was eight years old. They were not pretty. I battled contact lenses some twenty-odd years ago when they were annoying nuisances that had to be taken out and cleaned daily. This was before the era of disposal lenses that you could actually sleep in. I slept in mine a few times too but neither my doctor nor my eyes were happy about it. So I gave them up and thanked the folks who made light weight plastic lenses and more fashionable frames. And I accepted my lot in life. I would always need assistance of some sort to see. Years ago when laser eye surgery became the medical procedure de jour , I was ready. Everyone and his mother convinced me to wait to see if there were any long term residual effects they didn't yet know about and for the price of the procedure to go down to a more reasonable level. I didn