👁️ My experience with LASIK eye surgery

I finally decided to take the plunge and lazer-beam my eyes 😵‍💫

The story

I was born with a perfect vision. It lasted well until around 16 when I started noticing slight blurriness. I am blaming myself. I had a stupid idea to do homework and watch TV at the same time, the TV was less than 1m away. Yes, I was young and stupid. Now… I am not as young 🤣

Long story short, by my early 20s, I had to squint to see something further away. We even had an inside joke with my other shortsighted friends. When we were immigrating to Canada in 2010, I decided to buy my first glasses. Initially, I wasn’t wearing them regularly (this is how it always starts). Around 2011, glasses have become a permanent part of my life.

Since then, up until now, my eyesight has regressed to about -2.25 (left) and -2.75 (right) with medium/strong astigmatism. My prescription has got stabilized about 3-4 years ago.

Glasses suck

Lots of people love (or at least are fine with) wearing glasses and can live with them all their life. For me, I disliked them very much. To be fair, glasses indeed can add an interesting component to a person’s style. However, the practical downsides ruin the upsides. Especially, active sports: swimming, snowboarding, windsurfing, etc. Also, I tried several contact lenses, and even super thin ones were causing strong enough discomfort to abandon this idea.

Hesitation

Of course, as a person wearing glasses for more than a decade, I have heard many stories about laser eyesight corrections. Most of them were very positive, even magical.

The only thing I regret is not doing it [the surgery] earlier.

On the other hand, obviously, there are risks. When doing research, I found some websites from unhappy customers who had complications after the procedure with varied problems. It was scary. The idea that I could get blind was extremely concerning. I am a visual person and the risk of not being able to see this unbelievably beautiful world was very scary to me.

I saw it as a one-way door decision. There was no way back after this. So, I had to carefully weigh the benefits and risks.

The decision

The possibility of not wearing glasses was very tempting and has not left my mind (reminds me of the movie Inception =) I’ve been pondering the pros and cons for a long time and finally, decided to accept the risks for the opportunity to increase the quality of life. Especially, considering that they do not recommend this procedure after 45 years old #FOMO 😆

I went for a consultation in February, and they offered me the next available surgery date in March. I wasn’t ready =)) and decided to take a few more months to think about it. By the next available date in July, I was more comfortable with this decision and finally, did it.

The procedure

I was supposed to come in at 9:45 with the expectation of spending 1.5 hours in the clinic. If you deduct the initial waiting time, the 2-min meet and greet with the doctor, and the secondary waiting time with anesthetic eye drops, I was in and out of the surgery room within 10 minutes. It was very fast.

The surgery itself took about 2 minutes max on the left eye, and 3 minutes in the right eye (stronger prescription → more laser time).

The cutting of the cornea was not painless, and frankly quite uncomfortable. This doctor used a real (motorized?) blade, a traditional way. The newer tech is to use a laser to make the cut, instead of a blade. Overall, the level of discomfort was higher than I anticipated.

A quick checkup a few minutes after the surgery, and I was free to go.

PS If you are really curious about how it works, here is a video.

After the procedure

My eyes were watering and burning for a few hours, but not too bad. Eye drops and a 2-hour nap helped 🛌

2 types of eye drops: antibiotics for 30 days and moisturizing for 2 months. You can’t touch your eyes for 4 days, no water, nothing except for the eye drops. No boxing for 2 weeks 😆

🤞The vision was very good after 5 hours, though still with some “fogginess”, but pretty great.

4 days later - better, but still some fogginess, dryness, a “halo” effect around lights and a star-like effect around bright light spots (e.g. sun reflection). I’d say the left eye is 99%, and the right eye is 95% recovered.

Will add an update after a few weeks.