Patient Profile:

Miracle Off Ice
Chris and Caitlin Neil sit down to discuss Intralase SBK results (“perfect”) and their confidence in Focus Eye.

For a guy who has averaged 192 penalty minutes in each of six full seasons in his professional hockey club, you might expect Chris Neil to have a few rough edges when he is off the ice. He doesn’t. In an interview, along with his wife Caitlin, the some-time enforcer comes across as quietly engaging (hinting at how he’s become what sports writers call a ‘more complete player’, posting a respectable 27 points in each of his last three seasons with the club).

Recently, the right winger accompanied his wife Caitlin to her consultations at Focus Eye in advance of her Intralase SBK procedure and had nothing but positive things to say about the process, as well as the anticipated outcome. “I was definitely confident that she would be fine the next day,” says Chris. “I knew after the consultation that everything would be fine.”

Caitlin wasn’t so sure. She had “some reservations” leading up to her day-of-surgery, but adds that once she started asking around, she found that many of her friends and acquaintances are fans of Laser Vision Correction.

“I started hearing about “so many [other] people who’ve had it done,” she says. “Within a week and a half I’d probably met 30 other people” who had undergone LVC, including an aunt who’d had a PRK procedure.

Chris’ instincts about Intralase SBK and Focus Eye were spot-on. Caitlin was immediately seeing better after her procedure than she ever did with either glasses or contact lenses. “The bottom line,” he says, “is that when she woke up the next day she was able to see me without contacts or glasses.”

“Intralase SBK was a dream. It was perfect,” says Caitlin.

In fact, she remembers that neither the procedure nor the recovery were painful, and recalls that getting up the morning after surgery came with “a remarkably good feeling” about starting a day without contact lenses. “I felt like I was forgetting something,” Caitlin says.

That morning Chris headed away on a road trip and Caitlin was immediately back parenting the couple’s 21-month-old daughter, without any trouble.

“I’m extremely happy with the results, and I would recommend it to anybody,” says Caitlin, who en-thusiastically endorses Intralase SBK and Focus Eye, but saves her ‘Number One Fan’ status for Chris. “It’s been wonderful to wake up in the morning and be able to see my lovely husband.”