pkasbohm said:
Have a question for you all!
Has any of you had lasik eye surgery done?
I think I am going to have it done in Jan. or Feb. if i can get my butt in gear and do some research on it! It will be so nice not to wear glasses or contacts!
Pam, I had Lasik done a few years ago and was really thrilled with it. I would research the Doctor though... We have a couple in Dallas that adrvertize heavily, and, well, don't have the best success rate. I ask my eye doctor who the best person was, he sent me to a friend of mine's dad (who is a retina surgeon) who told me who the person he would use was. My Dr. was a little more expensive, but his main line of surgery is cornea surgery and transplants. Every Lasik Dr. says that they fix other peoples mistakes; the guy I used fixes other people's catastrophe's...
The procedure is fairly boiler plate now, if you use good equipment and follow the guidelines there is a huge success rate. A couple of things to watch for that I was warned about in my initial research...
1, make sure that the laser they use is certified for the type of laser they will be doing to you...
2, Make sure that the laser unit is stationary...some are in trailers that they move from place to place...not a good thing, it is too easy to get out of colibration.
3, make sure they check your eyes and do a full mock up computer model. If your cornea is not thick enough it WILL BE disasterous. Again, talk to the sergeon...
4. make sure that they are using a new blade not a sterilized blade (unless you opt for the bladeless lasik... a lot more time in the chair) The blade cannot be strilized properly without warping the blade...not good
As far as the procedure, I went into the laser center, and they gave me numbing drops. The Doctor proceeded to take a new Shapie pen and mar my eyes..Weird.... I layed down and he put a clamp on my eye and warned me it would go dark in one eye...it actually went grey..I held still, I heard it whuurrr, smelled a little burning flesh, in 5 mi nutes it was done, they did the next eye, and in 15 minutes I was out of there. Less than 45 minutes from start to finish (first appt). DW watched. My vision was already 20/30. It stabilized down to 20/15 after a few days. I was at work the next day (they told me to take a few days off...) I had some cool goggles to sleep in, but I was quite happy with the surgery.
There was one drawback, it accelerated my needing reading glasses (I was warned that this might happen). I have also had some other medical problems (unrelated) that has since attacked my vision. The 3-d models were quite helpful to establish a baseline for these other problems....
I hope this helps...
