Carbon Unit

It has been five or more years since I visited the doctor. I was told I would need to wear a protective contact lense for several months after having PRK. Is that still the same?

Brian Ratliff

Not at all. I had the protective lenses for just a week.

IANative

The LASIK was the best $2k I ever spent. I had a serious dry-eye condition before my LASIK, it's improved to a moderate problem since then. I strongly suggest full-coverage or mask-like sunglasses to protect your eyes from as much wind/debris as possible. After spending the money and getting the vision restored, I don't even step outside w/out a pair of good sunglasses on.

waynesworld

$2K?! That is cheap!

IANative

Yes, but my correction was very mild. I was probably 20/30, but 20 years of contact wear was destroying my eyes. I actually had to go on Restasis for a year before they'd even consider doing the LASIK surgery. Three weeks after the surgery, I was at 20/15. Five years later, I'm still better than 20/20.

kraftwerk 

I am thinking of just having one eye done as the right one is weaker than my left eye. Left is better but NOT even near 20/20. Would they just do one eye? Not really about saving money, the prices seem to range from 2k to 5k... I am kinda scared of the process so doing one eye would be more comforting and I think I could do away with glasses.

waynesworld

My Dr. offered to do one eye at a time, so I would think so.

Ice41000

Any problems during the night? Or night driving? Or watching TV or computer monitor?
How about swimming or diving (with eyes open)?

cyclebycle13

How anal are you about your vision? My wife is an optometrist and she would never let me go because I'm way too particular about my vision. It works but there are risks and if it doesn't go well, it's your vision. They're just now starting to see the long term effects (10-15 years out) and my wife is getting many of her old patients back because they're needing glasses again- not just for reading either.

If it works, it'll be great, but, it's NOT 100%.

dr_max

All the Lasik surgeons wear glasses.

I will never have my eyes put under a laser beam to remove a great fraction or my cornea.

I would if I had -12, but at -1 I will never take the risk since I never wear sunglasses on my rides.

stevebiker

That doesn't sound like having your vision restored. Do you mean that after LASIK, you need to protect your eyes from sunlight?

Carbon Unit

I wear contacts and I will not walk outside without sunglasses. I have also heard that wearing contact lenses has some long term negative effects so I will eventually have surgery.

HardyWeinberg

I was told the best ages to get lasik were ~25 and ~55, because your distance vision changes along with your near vision. A correction for distance vision would not last through the presbyopia process. So if you get lasik at 25 you have 20-30 yrs before presbyopia completes, which is a good span you would get your $$ worth, but you would need lasik again to restore your distance vision from whatever it changed during your loss of near vision. If you get lasik at 55 after presbyopia is complete, then there are no more foreseeable changes and you should be good to go the rest of your life.

Anyway, I was told I was a good candidate at about age 40 but they said I should wait 10-15 yrs since the beginning of presbyopia was expected to be right around the corner, and I should wait until that finalizes before considering lasik.

5+ yrs later I am still avoiding bifocals or reading glasses. I am presently inconvenienced because my Rx sunglasses went flying during an accident and got pulverized by road traffic. If I had had lasik I could just get another backup pair of non-Rx shades. Whatever...

Brian Ratliff

No issues at all with nighttime vision or TV. There is still a bit of residual asymatism at close distances which bugs me on the computer, but it's not serious issue and seems to be going away with time. I haven't tested the "underwater performance" of my eyes yet, but there is no reason why it should be an issue once the eyes heal. Because I haven't opened my eyes underwater since after I started wearing contacts regularly some 18 years ago, I am not even sure what I would be comparing it to.

Brian Ratliff

I went though this calculation too for a long time. My vision was extremely good with contacts (20:10 or 20:15 on a bad day). A metric is "best corrected vision" to evaluate surgery outcomes. Basically, the statistics suggest I had a decent chance of losing a line on the vision chart for best corrected vision after the surgery. I also had a pretty good chance of it staying the same or getting better. There was a relatively small chance of losing more than one line on the chart.

Once I made the decision to ditch contact lenses, then the choice was between guaranteed excellent vision with heavy glasses, or merely decent vision (a loss of one line would give me 20:20) with possibly light glasses (I assumed contacts were out after surgery). I opted for the latter. In retrospect, a good decision because I haven't suffered decreased best corrected vision and I see better than 20:20 without correction.

One of the other sticky issues is the laser surgery tech keeps getting better at a much faster pace than outcome evaluation. It means that for whatever surgery technology you have used on you, there are no 15 year patient outcomes to guide your decision. The tech used 15 years ago was pretty crude compared to current tech. For example, back then the corrected area was much smaller diameter so the patients are suffering from diffraction issues like halos and starbursts at night. They were using different lasers then which transferred more energy to the eye and created more vision artifacts. They are a lot more sophisticated now about secondary vision effects that aren't caught on an eye chart vision tests. There were also a lot of "vision correction mills" that sprung up in the late 90s early 00s which did a lot of surgeries for relatively cheap and kind of neglected the finer art of patient care which skew the long term statistics of vision surgery.

My basic point is the tech is much better than 15 years ago, so the outcomes for 15 year patients are not immediately relevant to current patients. It is good, because progressing tech is good, but it is bad because there is a natural vacuum of good information for making decisions. Especially because it is an elective surgery. I am happy with how I turned out, but it felt like a big plung into the unknown when I made the decision. On the other hand, the first time I saw street signs, about a month after surgery, I said to myself that even if my vision stopped getting better right then, I would be happy because I didn't have to mess with glasses or contacts. A month out, it was apparent that much of my life revolved around my eyes prior to the surgery. For instance, if I stayed out later than 10:00 with my contacts, I would get irritable, which my wife noticed. With glasses, with the correction I had, racing bikes would be hard, and with contacts, my contacts would dry out and stick at very inopportune times during a race or ride. Post surgery I was valuing my freedom from the vision correction routine more and my sharpness of vision less.

turkey9186

Six and half years for me and five for my wife. Neither one of us have any regrets.
My vision was corrected from 20/300 to better than 20/15 in both eyes. In July of this year, following a full exam there was no change from six months after the procedure.
I had the procedure on a Friday morning, Saturday and Sunday it felt like I had sunburned my eyes. By Monday everything was back to normal.
I did loose a little distance on my near vision. Now that I am over forty, I know I will need reading glasses in the next five or so years. I can live with that if I have my peripheral vision on the bike all the time though.

Brian Ratliff

For a while, your eyes are a bit sensitive to bright light, but from my experience, no more than when I had contacts. With contacts, if I was squinting a lot, my eyes would actually start hurting, like there was a sharp something being driven into my eyes. But it's not like you are a vampire or something and can't walk in the sun without shades or risk exploding. It's just that you are more sensitive for a time and you end up wearing sunglasses more than before. Not a huge issue at all.

howsteepisit

13 years ago for me. Went from 20/400 to 20/30. BEst thing ever did health wise. I do use a light correction for night driving, have a small bit of haloing, but the difference in enjoying things like skiing, cycling, and general living is worth the price. Go for it!

IANative

No, that's not what I mean. I guess I left out some of the "middle info." Much like skin cancer can show up years after bad sun exposure, so too can long term sun exposure to your eyes (especially light-eyed folks like me) result in eye damage down the road. Once my eye doc explained this to me, I began to wear good sunglasses religiously. This was the same doc who eventually did my LASIK, and he always reminds me (and all his patients) to protect your eyes from the sun.

So, my point was, that after spending that kind of money on my eyes, I'm not about to endanger them by neglecting to wear quality eye protection.

waynesworld

Not true. Not mine.

Carbon Unit

This is a generalization. How many Lasik surgeons have you met?

mattm

(lasik) Sounds too expensive, side-effects sound too annoying.

"Day & Night" contacts ftw. You wear them for a month straight!!

krobinson103

So I need to wear sunglasses sometimes. So what? When I wake up and I can read the clock, and see the world clearly without glasses or contacts I call it a life changer. Spend your whole life half blind and then discover the world is in fact 3d and not flat like you've been seeing it is a big change.

adefeatedman

My buddy does Lasik and other cornea related surgeries for a living. He had Lasik done by a fellow coworker recently. I'm going to have him operate on me within a year or two when I save up some money for the procedure.

The_Price_I_Pay

I will be having it done as soon as soon I get back. The Army is now doing it for all Active duty Soldiers but Combat Arms get to go first, luckily I'm Combat Arms. Originally the Army only used the PRK technique, but since it's i has now started to offer both PRK and LASIK. I feel that is the Military thinks it's good enough for Combat Arms (to include Special Forces) then it's probably good enough for the average civilian. I think the ultimate issue for the Army was how well the eye held up after surgery and if it was more prone to damage, but now that they are offering both types of surgeries I guess that question has been answered. As for heal time, I have had several friend that had PRK (along with my parents) and have heard mixed results when it came to recovery time. My folks, on one hand, had completely different experiences. My Mother, who had much worse vision than my Father, was clear as a bell and back at her normal activities almost immediately. My Father's recovery was more difficult and he suffered with double vision, halos, and stars causing him to ultimately have to go back and get a touch up. After the touch up he said it took about 3 weeks before his eyes were perfect and how he sees better than 20/20.