Peak Vision and Lasik Recovery

For some reason my Peak Vision sunglasses have been buried in my golf bag for about three weeks and I keep forgetting to bring them in with me to work. Well, call it inspiration, or call it intense wind and dirt flying in my face, but I decided to give them another try.

And by "another try" I mean "once again." "Another try" makes it sound like I didn't like them, which is just about as far from the truth as you can get. Honestly, the reason I stopped wearing them for a while was because I hated having to take them off every time the sunlight disappeared and the overcast sky was the only thing you could see above the horizon. For some strange reason I believed that the sunglasses ceased to work when this happened. I thought they needed sun to work correctly. Yes, I am that stupid.

Random thought, but does pollen come out this time of year? I thought it was always JUST in the spring. I don’t know. Who knows? Pollen is the only thing I can come up with, because my eyes have been so irritated lately. This is of course sucks gonads, because that means the recovery from my Lasik surgery CONTINUES to crawl along at an unbearable pace. I heard from somebody recently that it took 8 MONTHS for his eyes to fully recover. I hope I'm not an "exception to the rule" and am still dealing with all of this a year from now.

So I come home every night and literally drown my eyeballs in preservative-free drops (supposedly less irritating), trying to convince my eyes NOT to turn red and itch. But they never listen. And to top it all off, I use this suspicious-looking grease that I'm supposed to apply to my lower-lids before I fall asleep to help with the whole "lubrication process." I'm not really sure it works, because the next morning I look like hell and can't seem to go out in public without these 30-lbs bags underneath my eyes. Other caddies are starting to notice and will ask me things like, “What the hell happened to you last night? Did you go out and get shit-faced? What was her name? Are you sick? Are you stoned?”

“No.”

“Well then what the hell is wrong with you?”

“Caddying during the day irritates my eyes and due to the healing process from the surgery, I can’t help but look fucked up the next day.”

“Oh. Well in that case, REALLY get shit-faced and REALLY come to work stoned. You can always just tell them you’re eyes are just irritated from the surgery.”

Yeah. I’ll get right on that.

But anyway, I was on the 9th green and was about to take off my Peak Vision sunglasses when I decided to experiment with them a bit. Several large clouds were sweeping through the course and the bright sun of the first 8 holes was all but extinct. It just looked grey outside. The other caddie was tending the flag and helping one of the other players with a read, so I decided now would be as good a time as any. I put on the sunglasses and started glancing around the putting surface. Spike marks and other imperfections stuck out like sore thumbs and the green looked somewhat texture-ized. The light and dark shades of green stood out like squares on a checkerboard.

Then I took them off. I was astounded at what I saw. Everything looked flat and flawless. No imperfections. No grains stood out. I noticed the various “noses” (areas of obvious break) around the green, but nothing else caught my attention. It was like I lost all sense of depth perception.

So I quickly put the sunglasses back on and kept them on for the rest of the day. And the amazing thing, at least from a caddies’ perspective, was that I was still able to see the breaks on the greens. Clearly. The guys I was caddying for? Yeah, they couldn’t. So that definitely helped my tip and gave me a little more confidence out there. Kinda felt like a God at a few points.

While some of you may have already known that you could wear sunglasses like these under dimly-lit circumstances and come out on top, I sure as hell didn’t, and I tell you, discovering this wonderful trait on my own was such a great experience. It inspired me to actually FOCUS on the greens again. I had all but given up on trying to figure them out. I think with the sun gone I caught the course with its pants down. Without sunlight, there are no shadows or disruptive glares on the putting surface to confuse your read. It was wonderful.