Freedom 56
Whether it’s working with pro hockey players or serving the Royal Family of Dubai, Dr. Bill Henry and his clan are finding life much improved since
having LVC.
Dr. William (Bill) Henry’s story is a familiar one: a middle-aged man who had laboured with glasses for years finally decides to have Laser Vision Correction.
But when you look a little closer, you realize that Bill’s tale has some interesting twists. At 56, he is the team dentist for Ottawa’s NHL club, a position he has held since the club first came to town 18 years ago. And while he has worn glasses since his mid-20s, the husband and father only recently gave LVC a second look after his daughter Katerine underwent her own procedure and came home with nothing but rave reviews.
“She needed lenses for distance vision,” says Bill. When she came home for Christmas last year she decided enough was enough and made an appointment with Focus. “Her procedure went very smoothly and she’s talked about it as one of the best things she’s ever done for herself.”
When pressed on exactly why LVC was such a life-changed for his daughter, Bill explains that Katerine “has been an airline attendant in Dubai for the past three and a half years”, serving the Royal Family on a plane the “equivalent to Air Force One” in the United States.
“Her experience with LVC gelled my thinking on the subject,” says Bill, whose wife, José Lanctot, underwent her own procedure to correct for reading vision (Monovision). “It’s worked for all of us. For me it’s like Freedom 56,” he enthuses.
Life at Scotiabank Place is much easier. Seated in his familiar place — two rows behind the home-team bench — where Bill acts as dentist-on-site for both Ottawa and visiting teams, he is “now able to follow the play without the annoyance of glasses”.
“I always had to take my glasses on and off.” Now, when the puck goes in the corner or a player takes a hit, Bill sees the action in high definition.
Over the years, he says he’s seen countless players struggle with contact lenses and wonders aloud what would have happened to some of them had they undergone LVC. “Ron Tugnutt was always looking for his contacts,” says Bill of the former Ottawa goalie from 1996-99. “If he’d had it done, it would have prolonged his career.”
Away from the ice and his private practice, Bill is able to enjoy rural living on his farm in the community of Dunrobin in Kanata, where he and his wife used to breed horses.
These days, the horses are gone but the natural surroundings still hold their allure. “It’s cool to be able to run through the woods without having to wear glasses and getting them all steamed up. It’s tremendous to see nature at its finest: now I can pick the birds out in the trees, whether they are hawks or owls, and spot deer.”