St. Louis-based cosmetic
surgeon, Dr. Pablo DiSanchaz is finding an out-of-the-box way to handle all
those left over glasses people have after they undergo Lasik surgery. He will
construct a statue out of the glasses that are donated. The glasses that
patients donate will be stored in the front office, and when enough have been
collected a statue will be created.
“Many of my patients would come to me during their follow-up visit and tell me
they had no idea what they were going to do with their old glasses,” Dr.
DiSanchaz said. “For a while I took up a collection for children, but really
what child wants to walk around in a pair of glasses some 50 year old picked
out? It’s not cool.”
It takes over 500,000 pairs of glasses to make a small three foot statue. Dr.
DiSanchaz is collecting over 100 pairs a week, and already has 100,000 that
were saved from previous donations, or ones children didn’t want when
donated.
“At the rate that we are collecting glasses it could take another year or two,”
Dr. DiSanchaz said. “I hope to get other local Lasik surgeons on board. I
believe together we can collect enough glasses to construct some type of statue
that patients would enjoy looking at.”
The proposed plan for the statue is to place it at the entrance to the Lasik
office. Once there is enough for one statue, another collection will start for
a second statue.
“I think this is really a therapeutic way to handle a transition from seeing a
life through glasses, to one that no longer involves glasses,” said Dr.
DiSanchaz.
The statue’s design has yet to be determined. Dr. Pablo DiSanchaz held a
contest for local artists to help design the statue. Local artists were asked
to create an outlined design for a statue that would go in front of a St. Louis Lasik center.
The only parameters were it had to involve metal, and it had to involve the
concept of eyesight or Lasik surgery somehow.
Dr. DiSanchaz and his staff narrowed the number of entries down to 10. The 10
entries will be voted on by patients, and the winner of the final design will
be announced in the middle of the year.
“We got some really amazing submissions”, Dr. DiSanchaz’s secretary, Diana
Franks said. “We have some really talented people in the area. I think we had
over 1,000 entries and each one was totally awe-inspiring. It was so hard to
narrow down our choices to just a few designs but it had to be done.”
