Sorry for the lack of posts for the last few days. Last Friday I had LASIK done!!! My big metamorphosis is me! No more glasses!
I’ve been wearing glasses since I was 7 years old…that’s uh…erm…hang on lemme bring up the calculator…25 years of glasses (a math whiz, I am not). At first it was just for reading. My mom noticed that I held books about a nanometer from my nose so off to Sears we went for THE fugliest pair of reading glasses the 80s has ever seen. By my senior year in high school I needed them all the time but I didn’t want glasses so my mom let me get contacts. I wore contacts through college. Sadly, I still had those SAD little 2nd grade readers (hey, my prescription was pretty consistent so I could still see with them) that I wore when I took my contacts out or if I ran out. Those fugly things kept me motivated to wear my contacts if I wanted any type of a social life at all! Towards the end of college, my prescription finally changed enough that I needed new glasses so I conned my dad into buying me a decent set of frames…which were then destroyed about a year later when I totalled my car shortly after graduating from college.
I was able to wear contacts pretty consistently until I got pregnant with Aidan. After having Aidan, I had pretty much stopped wearing contacts altogether…only for special occasions. Two years ago I decided that I wanted to get back into the habit of wearing contacts daily so I went to the eye doctor. He found that my astigmatism had progressed to the point that regular soft contacts couldn’t correct it well enough so he put me in toric lenses. I don’t know if you’re familiar with these but they’re HORRIBLE. They’re weighted at the bottom to keep them in place but they don’t necessarily move with your eyes like regular soft lenses do. This is not good when you’re chasing a toddler around or need to move your head and eyes quickly in a classroom. I needed sharp vision, not to have to wait for my freakin’ lenses to play catch up. Needless to say, I hated them, felt like I wasted my money on them and either wore my glasses (which were very cute black with zebra trim) or my old prescription soft contact lenses.
This really got me thinking about LASIK. I spoke with my stepdad, a nurse anesthetist who deals with a large number of eye cases. I asked him who he would see if it were him and he looked around and gave me some names. I wound up going with Dr. Carlos Diaz, a Board Certified Opthamologist. His practice specializes in eye surgeries, he’s not just some eye doctor that does LASIK on the side. I had several appointments to make sure I was right for LASIK (check to see if my corneas were thick enough, etc) and when it came time for my surgery, the surgical center was FANTASTIC. We’re talking scalp, back and arm massages, soft music, ocean imagery on the flat screen tvs, and Dr. Diaz and his staff walked me through every step of the surgery as they were doing it so there was no apprehension. The only part that I really disliked was the suction that they used to create the flap and that was only 30 seconds per eye and it didn’t really even hurt my eye itself (that’s numb from the anesthetic drops), it’s the pressure on the orbital bones that hurts.
After the surgery I came home and slept for probably 14 hours and by the next day I could see SO much better! I’ve always had astigmatism which meant that my vision has never been sharp. As Ryan was driving me to the surgical center for my follow up I could see individual leaves on trees as we were driving by! I couldn’t even do that with my glasses on before surgery! Dr. Diaz told me that my astigmatism is all but gone and my nearsightedness will fade even more as my eyes heal over time. It’s so strange seeing well without glasses on, not getting headaches from not wearing glasses (before LASIK, sometimes I’d cheat and go without my glasses, but I’d get an eyestrain headache). The only things I’m dealing with now is extreme light sensitivity (even more than before and I had very bad photophobia before…oh well, I love cute sunglasses!), my eyes get drier easily, and I can’t rub my eyes. I swear it feels like I have a lash in my right eye and its making me nuts, all I want to do is look in the mirror, stick my finger in and get the lash out but that’s a BIG OL’ no-no right now as my flaps are still “open” and I could introduce pathogens and cause infection and that’d be bad. So I irrigate, irrigate, irrigate.
If anyone is considering LASIK, I highly recommend it. I will say, I didn’t have an incredibly high prescription. My vision was 20/40 in my right eye and 20/60 in my left, my main issue was my astigmatism which is what LASIK is fantastic at fixing. So I say this:
1) Do your homework when you’re looking for a doctor. My doc is AMAZING. Pretty much all he does is eye surgeries…he’s not really the guy you go to if you’re looking for a pair of back to school glasses. He’s very conservative but that’s why he has a 1% revision rate for LASIK while the rest of the nation has a 14-15% revision rate.
2) Ask what’s included in the fees. My fees included everything for the next year. A lot of places will lure you in with a “great rate” of $699/eye but then they get you with all the additional stuff like surgical center fees, laser fees, follow-up appointment fees, etc.
3) Don’t let internet horror stories scare you off. There are a number of them out there. You get what you pay for. If you go to a cut-rate doctor and expect perfection, you’re going to be disappointed. These are the people out there on the internet, screaming about how much LASIK sucks. No, your doctor sucked and you were stupid for not vetting him or her out thoroughly. If you go to a high quality doctor, you’ll get a high quality surgery, and vice versa.