Lasik Intervention

I am happy to be able to attach a slightly different “testimony” about my experience with the LASIK intervention at the LaserFocus Clinic in Belgrade and about dr Mirko Jankov.

Marina Hasson

I have been living in Toronto (Canada) for 15 years and I have been wearing glasses for 28 long years. Because of an incident of a ‘foreign body in the eye’ that was solved in the emergency unit when I was a little girl, because of the movie ” A Clockwork Orange” by Stanley Kubrick (I know, I know how it sounds now!), I just never tried to wear lenses… Even applying makeup or if an eyelashe would fall into the eye, it could be an ‘incident’ for me. I guess it must be called a kind of phobia… Anyway, the frames of the best designers have eased the ‘difficulty’ of wearing glasses for the last 15 years, literally every moment I was awake.

The thought of LASIK did not occur to me, precisely because of those, although only a few minutes, as I was informed, where I would be awake, the eye open and the intervention takes place with my full awareness… that was simply out of question!

The moment of decision came easily and for one reason only: Mirko Jankov, my best school friend that I know since he was six, with whom I sat in the bench for almost 12 years of primary and secondary school, became a world expert on LASIK and opened a clinic in Belgrade – LaserFocus. A few phone and Skype calls headed off even the last suspicion. I’m coming…

How fantastic it is to have perfect eyesight immediately after the operation, how much the whole Laser Focus team is ahead of its time by the attitude towards the patient and the latest achievements of the technique they possess, expertise and friendly treatment, every other ‘testimony’ will confirm. It is a “world” dream team, which could easily be located in Toronto, New York, Paris and still be better established than many. For example, my husband had a LASIK intervention just a month before me, at a clinic in Toronto that takes care of the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team as well as the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team. Seeing the treatment of patients in that elite Canadian clinic, LaserFocus, in my opinion, would easily win the first place if I would compare all the stages that a patient goes through from pre-op examination, through the intervention itself to post-op recovery and examination. But you have already heard all this from other satisfied patients.

The ‘new’ thing my story brings is how dr Mirko Jankov was a perfectionist from an early age – a boy interested in science, simply fascinated by physics, especially when we were learning about geometric optics. I must mention that in the exemplary Elementary School “Vladislav Ribnikar”, and later in the Eighth (today the Third) Belgrade Gymnasium, we always had some frightening professors of physics. And while we, ordinary high school students, were afraid of that teaching (Biljana Milinković, I hope you read these lines!), Mirko was the student who asked and asked to find out not more, but EVERYTHING on the topic of prisms, anatomy of the eye, refraction of light, often adding what he himself read somewhere and learned… Yes, our professors were amazed too!

In addition to that, every day, after doing homework, our choir rehearsals, practicing with an air rifle, or marathon tours of preference, a few hours would be dedicated to practicing the guitar.

That is why it is not surprising that today, dr Mirko Jankov is a world-renowned specialist, self-confident, versatile, interesting interlocutor and in addition to that a pleasant, normal man, a wonderful husband, and a great dad, who again has the time, knowledge, patience to treat you and your eyesight as if you were the only one in the world… All his knowledge and years of research, published scientific thesis, improvements in technology, versatility, are fully dedicated to you and your health – in my opinion, it is the most important thing to know when you entrust your sight to someone.

Because of all this, to me the strongest impression from LASIK was the intervention itself:

After years of that uncomfortable fear caused by a foreign body in the eye, and the intervention, the LaserFocus team performs all the necessary examinations and measurements in the pre-operative phase. Then you hear the details of the procedure at least twice, which are slowly becoming a family topic from complicated science. Dressed in a ‘protective apron’ from head to foot, so that the hygiene wouldn’t be compromised during the intervention, sitting in comfortable leather armchairs, I get 2 drops of anesthetic and I hear for the third time the details about the course of LASIK intervention from dr Tina Mraković. In a knowledgeable, but the humane and rather witty tone, she answers my questions and the questions of two other patients who are waiting to correct their vision. Every panic stops for me there and I know that it is one of the best decisions I have ever made.

However, the ‘icing on the cake’ is the intervention itself, which not only does not hurt, but it is so predictable (since the patient gets there prepared) that when dr Jankov announces in one half-whisper what is happening at that moment, you are a witness to a process where everything is occurring according to protocol, without any lack of comfort, without pain and without fear. And then, when I found out that both eyes were corrected during the same procedure, the only thing I thought about is that we are privileged because we have a top expert with a phenomenal character and a great reputation right here, in Belgrade (and Sarajevo, Budva, and Sao Paolo). All in all, besides the birth of my three sons, this is certainly one of the most wonderful experiences I ever had. In other words, if LASIK was a sport, we would gather in front of the Assembly to “welcome” dr Mirko Jankov. “