I've been perusing the lasik message boards for creatures like me who aren't certain yet if it was worth the hassle. I've found two groups of people; the ones I'd always heard about who had the surgery on Friday and were back at work Monday like nothing ever happened and the people like me who wondered what the hell happened that they weren't like the first group. The more I dug, the more I noticed that the perky people had very low corrections -2s and such. The people like me had much greater correction, -6s up to -9s. People with greater corrections seemed to have more problems with dry eye, with blurriness, with irritation. I guess it makes sense. We had two to three times more cornea burned off. We've had much more trauma to the eye that wasn't there before and doing more damage with the laser has to be more traumatic to the eye.
I wish I would have known this. It would make everything more tolerable if I hadn't been expecting everything to be easy and life back to normal in just a couple of days. They also forgot to tell me the no antihistimines rule until half an hour before the surgery. Right now my vision goes in and out depending on how dry my eyes decide to be that day. One day my right eye will be fine, except for slight blurriness, the next day it'll feel totally irritated. I can't do computer work for more than two hours without totally exhausting my eyes, and if I do intense computer work, I won't be able to read that evening due to eye strain and irritation. I am going through about 150 vials of eyedrops a week, down from 40-50 a day right after surgery - but still pretty intense. And my eyes have been healing perfectly and amazed the eye doctor with how quickly they were healing. Imagine what it would be like if I'd had complications! Oh, and because I can't rub my eyes and clean them well, I am starting to form stys on the eyelids and have to put hot compresses on them which drys my eyes even more.
And it isn't as cool as I thought it would be. The whole seeing the clock clearly in the morning thing wears off quickly when you wake up three times a night to put eyedrops in because your eye lid is sticking to your cornea. I wanted lasik for the convenience - not having the discomfort and bother of contact lenses and seeing better than glasses. I have neither at this point. I fool with my eyedrops more than I ever did with my contacts and my eyes are always tired or irritable. With the blurrines of dry eye and the bluriness of one eye focusing rather than both, I saw better with glasses which force both eyes to focus equally well - something I've found doesn't happen normally without lenses.
The bright part is that on the message boards there are people who were like me who are now a year out of surgery and say that it does get better, that it took them six months of irritation and dry eye but now they are so happy they did it and would never go back. That is something to look forward to. I do have some good days where my eyes feel good and I look in the mirror and like what I see and enjoy the freedom. They are usually just half days here and there - but I really hope they will become the norm and make it worth the extravagant money we paid.
Monday, August 27, 2007
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