I had this kind of thread at another site, but wanted to maintain one here just because I know how difficult a decision like having LASIK can be. I remember having lots of questions that the doctor couldn't answer. So if anyone has any testimonials, issues, questions, etc please post'em.
For me, my vision went bad early in high school, so from 16 until about 4 years ago I had glasses and mostly contacts. I had contact lenses for about 20 years before my eyes finally rejected them outright. It didn't matter what type of lenses I used, I could only wear them for about an hour before my body tried to reject them like a virus being rejected by my own immune system.
What finally put my decision over the edge was one night I heard someone screwing around outside, so I looked out my bedroom window to see some idiot breaking into my truck. I yelled some obscenity down at them but I didn't have my glasses on and couldn't see the face, or the plate number of the helper truck that wisked away the bad guy. That's it, I'm gonna have eye surgery.
Fortunately, I was a perfect candidate for LASIK since I have thick meaty corneas (misshapen as they are) so I could expect a relatively short "surgery". I got the wavefront custom variety, so they try and match any shape irregularities instead of a one-size-fits-all correction.
Well, they tell you that the surgery is short, and they aren't kidding. Total in/out was less that 10 minutes. The actual blasting of the laser lasts only about 10-20 seconds per eye. The only discomfort I felt was the contraption they strap your into puts pressure on your eye/head to keep your head steady, but you can still glance around as the laser control system will track your eye movement. They give you Codine to relax you, and I'm glad they did that pressure was annoying. There are two stages to the procedure. The first is creating the flap so they can fold it back in order to zap your eye. Creating the flap had me squirming, but it goes faster than the laser part, so I didn't really even notice. Snip! It's done. But man with that flap folded back, things are blurrrry!
After the surgery, I was worried because the vision was totally blurry. However, being the cheater that I am I tried to glance around the eye protection I was wearing and I got a look at the clock. Even with the newly flapped and laser carved eye meat, I was able to see the edges of the numbers on the clock like I hadn't seen them since I was a kid. So things were blurry, but I suddenly had hope.
It took about 2 days for the blur to wear off, and a good 2 months for the blur to disappear, but what I was left with is perfect vision. Better than perfect really, I was reading 20/10 with both eyes at the 1 week follow-up appointment. Frankly, going for so long with bad vision and in just a few days going to exceptional vision was hard to handle. My senses were nearly overloaded with all the new details I could see. I could see the sharp sparkle of each palm needle on a tree instead of just seeing a palm tree, and I could make out the individual pieces of wire in a chain-link fence instead of just acknowledging that a fence is there somewhere.
So overall, it was a super positive and life-changing experience for me.
TM
