Ok my LASIK experience: The first time you go its a consultation. They do some pretty advanced scans of you eyes to even let you know that you are a candidate. I had -1.25 and -2.75 vision with a +3 power stigmatism in one eye (smaller one in the other). I was on the cusp of getting a more advanced version of the surgery, but I had just been wearing contacts and that will affect the shape of your cornea, so I suggest at least two weeks of no contacts before even going in. If your wondering what he difference is between the basic and more custom surgery is, one does almost what contacts and glasses do, usually for stigmatism they need to rotate/weight your contacts to stay at a certain place, this is usually in quarter rotations. The advanced surgery allows for 1/100 rotations and the laser does more fine precision correcting. At least that was what they told me. The initial visit takes about 2 hours. Now for the fun part. The surgery day. Basically when you come in, they are going to do all of the same tests again to see if you prescription has changed from wearing contacts, mine did, and it was a goody thing as I was now a solid candidate for the advanced surgery. Most of this almost 4 hour visit will be waiting, checking, and rechecking your vision. Down to the nitty gritty... Your going to meet the actual surgeon at this point. Hes a busy guy, there were four other guys waiting with me in the final prep room. Once you get in, he does a final check on your eyes in the surgical room. You will lay down and get situated. The nurse will put a few drops in your eyes that will start the numbing process on your eyes. They will sting for about 5 seconds and then feel slightly swollen. After a few moments for that to kick in, you will be rolled under the laser. They will align your eye up and you will have to focus on a blinking red light. If you are squeamish about your eyes... Stop reading... The first step is they put an eye patch over the eye they are not working on, and then tape open the active eye to keep lashes out of way. Next they insert what they called a spring, which forces your eye open, this is really the only uncomfortable part, but your eye is numb so you dont feel real force of it. After that is probably the strangest weirdest experience ever... They put a suction tube over your eye... And it slowly blacks out... At this point, is when they move the cornea out of the way. Your vision in that eye will slowly come back and you will start to refocus on very foggy and blurry red flashing light. The laser will start its work. You will not see it, only hear it. You might catch some blue light every now and then. And yes, it will have a similar burning smell that you get at the dentist when he is drilling. After the laser is done, they slide the cornea back into place and things appear as if you were under water. At this point it vision will start reappearing, the surgeon will be moving your cornea with a tool that looks like a thick plastic scalpel, but its not, hes smoothing your cornea out at moving it into place... It actually felt soothing. They will repeat the process with your other eye, and then you will go home and sleep. They will fill you in on your prescriptions and once you wake up, you will feel a big sore, but significantly improved vision. Today was my follow up visit and I was already at 20/20 and healing much faster than expected. Full heal time is about a week.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 00:37:53 +0000
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