Better eyesight for boomers
Those of us age 45-plus can now truly get rid of our eyeglasses and contact lenses 95 per cent of the time. “Until now, options were limited for those over 45,” said Dr. Ron Baldassare, an eye surgeon at Kelowna General Hospital and the owner of Vivid Laser Centre.
“Even if they had Lasik (laser eye) surgery to correct nearsightedness, farsightedness and-or astigmatism, they might still need contact lenses or reading glasses because of their age.”
However, Baldassare, the Interior’s only corneal specialist, is helping pioneer the major advancement of extended depth of focus technology that can correct a baby boomer’s vision at almost all distances.
The surgery is also know as clear lens extraction and the lens technology by the patented name of Symfony.
The procedure is performed exactly like cataract surgery.
But instead of removing a cloudy natural lens in the eye, as with cataract surgery, your clear natural lens is replaced with the acrylic Symfony lens.
Using a proprietary diffraction pattern and chromatic aberration reversal, the symfony lens provides newfound focusing ability to see clearly, at near, intermediate and far distances.
“This truly is life-changing surgery,” said Baldassare.
“It has become a big, growing segment of Vivid Laser’s business because baby boomers want to be free of glasses too.”
The range of clear vision after Symfony is especially good for focusing on your computer, iPad, smartphone or book.
However, Baldassare admits you might still have to keep a pair of reading glasses kicking around to see the kind of fine print on small labels.
Replacing your natural clear lens for an artificial one may sound scary.
However, by the time you’re 45, your natural lens has started to harden, leading to the loss of ability to see up close and the need for reading glasses.
Cataract surgery is one of the most common and safe operations in the world.
It requires a tiny 2.4 mm incision to extract the old, natural lens and put the new, artificial lens in the existing lens sack.
The same method is used with the Symfony lens.
Baldassare has already done 400 clear lens extractions with excellent results.
With such a high success rate, Vivid Laser views clear lens extraction with the Symfony lens as one of the best solutions for baby boomers who want better vision without glasses or contact lenses.
The price for clear lens extraction with the Symfony lens is higher than Lasik and depends whether astigmatism needs correction at the same time.
The price for the standard Lasik procedure, which reshapes your cornea using laser to make your vision clearer and sharper, is $2,250 per eye.
Check out VividLaser.com. overnight flights for obvious reasons.
The 11 p.m. departure and 6 a.m. arrival just four hours later with the time difference generally equates to a crappy night’s sleep in sitting upright in a plane seat.
But the positives are another flight time option, using the flight as travel-and-sleep double duty and arriving with the whole day ahead of you, instead of spending almost a whole day on a daytime flight.
Plus, red eyes tend to be cheaper to make them more attractive.
For instance, I checked Aug. 1 departures, returning a week later, for both Air Canada and WestJet.
The Air Canada flights were $340 for the daytime outbound flight and $235 for the red eye.
On WestJet the comparable flights were $339 and $256.
The four Toronto-Kelowna flights on the two airlines are in the $240 range and have day and evening timing. to ship orders and has certainly caught the eye of the company.
Birch Hill was one of 2,000 Canadian small businesses to enter the inaugural FedEx Small Business Grant Contest.
Birch Hill didn’t win the grand or runner-up prize, but it was one of eight small businesses to win a bronze medal.
The medal comes with $5,000 to use to grow the business.
The grand prize winner was Nova Scotia’s Faire Child, which makes kids’ jackets, raincoats and backpacks from recycled plastic water bottles.
Fair Child picked up $25,000, a meeting with FedEx Express Canada president Lisa Lisson, a brand marketing workshop with FleishmannHillard HighRoad and a consulting meeting with Doug ‘The Retail Prophet’ Stephens.
The list of the top 10 most expensive cities for one-bedroom rents actually includes 11 cities because Kelowna and Calgary tied for 10th with at $1,140.
The most exorbitant place to rent a onebedroom is, no surprise, overheated Vancouver with a monthly average of $2,090.
Also in the top 10 are Toronto, Burnaby, Barrie, Montreal, Victoria, Kingston, Ottawa and Oshawa.