Hi Everyone – The purpose of this post is to document (and share) my experience with Lasik over time, so that others can learn from my experience and I can learn from others. I submitted a posting earlier after week 1, but wanted this posting to be more like a journal with occasional updates over the 6-month period when things supposedly settle.
My basic story is this:
I am a 38 year old male and have been wearing glasses for 32 years with a mild/moderate prescription in the 3.0 – 3.5 range for nearsightedness with a slight astigmatism.
I had CustomVue Lasik three weeks ago on January 15, 2008, hoping to get the same “miracle” results that I had heard about from a number of friends and acquaintances. That didn’t happen.
For both 1 day and 1 week exams my vision was about the same 20/30 left, 20/40 right…not exactly what I had in mind. (I know prescription numbers are better, but I don’t have those).
Reading, which was never a problem before, started out horrible for the first week or so, and has now become marginally bearable. I still can’t read a newspaper or book for more than a few minutes at a time. I tried 1.0 reading glasses hoping that would help. It made the letters bigger, but not really any clearer, and mostly just made me feel woozy. So I don’t use them much.
I think my distance vision has improved a little bit since then, but I don’t really know for sure. It really seems to vary a lot--day by day and hour by hour. Rather than slow or no improvement, it seems like some days are good and some aren’t. I’ve hung an eye chart on my fridge to see how I’m doing, and the results are really mixed. Sometimes I can make out a couple letters on the 20/20 line, sometimes it’s all just a blur. I’m curious to see what I find out at my one month exam on 2/22.
I had the typical glare/halo problems at night for the first 10 days or so. There is still some minor halo effect, but not enough to really bother me and not enough to make me think the same thing wasn’t there before the surgery.
I don’t feel like I have dry eyes per se, but my eyes definitely don’t feel right. Sometimes it’s a tired feeling, sometimes scratchy, sometimes blurry/dizzy feeling. I hope that goes away. I know drops are supposed to help, so I use them every few hours or when my eyes are really bothering me.
All of these things are more of a nuisance than a real problem. My vision isn’t horrible – I can function OK without glasses – but I can’t see as good as I did when I had glasses. All the weird things going on with my eyes aren’t debilitating, but they are annoying and certainly weren’t problems before the surgery. Not being able to read really bugs me.
So after 3 weeks I’m really no happier with the results than I was at day 1. I’ll do my best to update this posting regularly over time. Comments and questions welcomed.