Joe M.'s LASIK Story

I've been wearing glasses since the third grade. That's over 35 years of reaching for the nightstand every morning before I could see anything, swapping frames every few years when the prescription changed or I sat on them, and never once being able to wear a pair of sunglasses. It's one of those things you just learn to live with, until you realize you don't have to.

For at least 10 to 15 years, I told myself I'd get LASIK eventually. The ads were everywhere, quoting somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000 per eye. But the price wasn't even what held me back. I made the mistake of watching a LASIK video on YouTube where they used something called a microkeratome to cut a flap in the eye. The best way I can describe it is a tiny cigar cutter slicing into your eyeball. I couldn't even wear contact lenses because I hated the idea of anything touching my eyes, and now I'd just watched a blade cut one open. LASIK went straight to the bottom of my list, and it stayed there for years.

Getting over the bias

If you read my hair transplant story, you know that a trip to Istanbul a couple of years earlier completely changed how I thought about care abroad. I went in with the same assumptions most Americans have, that the US has the best care in the world and going anywhere else is a gamble. Neither turned out to be true, and once you've experienced that firsthand, you start looking at every procedure differently.

So when I was planning a trip to Thailand with my family, I started looking into what was available there. Thailand is one of the most popular medical tourism destinations in the world, and the private international hospitals are genuinely impressive. That's when I found out about Femto LASIK, which uses a laser to make the incision instead of the microkeratome. No blade. No cigar cutter. The price for both eyes as a foreign patient was about $1,700, compared to $6,000 to $10,000 in the US, and I was already going to be in the country with my family anyway. It started to feel like the universe was running out of reasons for me not to do it.

Bangkok

The private hospital in Bangkok was nothing like what I'm used to in the States. No cold beige waiting room, no sitting around wondering if anyone remembers you're there. There was an army of friendly nurses who walked me from station to station through a few hours of pre-procedure testing, gave me a schedule of everything that would happen and when, and generally made the whole experience feel more like a concierge service than a hospital visit. Even though I was still anxious about what was coming, the lead-up was genuinely comforting.

The procedure itself was quick and mostly painless, but I won't pretend it was comfortable. When they flip the eye flap over, your vision completely inverts and it's incredibly disorienting. There's also a very distinct smell from whatever the laser is burning that I can't really describe, but you'll know it when it happens. If you're the type who gets anxious about medical stuff, do yourself a favor and ask for something to calm your nerves beforehand. I didn't, and I really wish I had.

Recovery in paradise

I spent the first 8 to 10 hours in bed with eye drops, letting my eyes do their thing. After about a day, I was back on my feet and exploring the city with my family. One of my first stops was to grab a pair of fake Ray-Bans I'd picked up at the market before the procedure, and I have to tell you, putting on sunglasses for the first time in over 30 years hit me harder than I expected. It's a small thing, but when you've never been able to do it, it doesn't feel small at all.

The rest of recovery was spent at beaches, wandering through night markets, and eating our way through the countryside. Thailand is hard to beat when it comes to tourism and food, and you can do it all for almost nothing compared to back home. It didn't feel like recovering from a procedure. It felt like a vacation, because it was one.

The math

The flight was about $1,150, the procedure was $1,700, and the whole three-week trip with my family, accommodations, and activities came to roughly $6,000. That's about what I would have paid for just the procedure at home, except at home there's no vacation, no night markets, and definitely no fake Ray-Bans.

Now

I love not reaching for my glasses every morning. Swimming is easier. My whole appearance changed, though most people notice the hair transplant first and assume I just switched to contacts. It's honestly one of those things where I keep thinking about how many years I wasted being scared of a YouTube video.

Between the hair transplant and the LASIK, two procedures I'd been putting off for years turned into two of the best decisions I've ever made. And both of them together, flights and vacations included, cost less than either one would have in the US on its own. That realization is what made me want to build something that could help other people do the same thing, and that's how JetWell got started.

Joe, 45, Las Vegas, NV. Founder & CEO of JetWell.