As I posted earlier in this thread, I've been pretty cautious about the whole area and especially about the LASEK/LASIK varieties, although it seems like they get better all the time. There's a lot of marketing hype and bad practitioners as well as good in this field. I held off for a long time because of this. Yet, there does seem to be a genuine benefit if you get a reputable surgeon and you're a good candidate for the surgery. My local eye Dr. finally convinced me after he found a good surgeon in the Puget Sound area who he trusted his own family to go to. On his advice I decided to go with PRK for a number of reasons (see the above-linked comparison between PRK and LASIK). I opted for the WaveFront PRK and it was done last January, total cost $2600 with lifetime warranty/corrections as needed. I was nearsighted and got great results. My L eye is dominant and is now 20/15 with zero astigmatism. The R eye is 20/25 (also zero astigmatism), which is good enough for me to go totally without correction, and gives me a practical monovision where the L eye gives great vision at distance and R lets me read up close despite presbyopia.
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Date Refractions Uncorrected Corrected
Pre-surgery R: -5.00 -0.75 x 140 20/600 20/15
L: -3.75 -0.50 x 085 20/400 20/15
8 mth post-op R: -1.0 0.00 20/25 20/15
L: -0.25 0.00 20/15 n.a.
The main drawback has been that you can have issues with what are called HOA (higher-order abberations), which affect your contrast sensitivity and fine detail of vision, such as night vision, glare, contrast. I especially notice it at night: it's harder to see details in the stars, or in dark areas like parking garages. But this improves gradually over time. Also, I tried to skip the prescribed Vicodin on the day of surgery, and that was a mistake. I recommend following doctor's orders, including pain medication. :-)
Overall I'm happy with the results and glad I did it. I went from being nearsighted all my life, glasses and contacts, and the last 3 years needing progressive lenses for both myopia and presbyopia, to today needing nothing at all. The vision quality is excellent, still with some HOA issues mainly at night but these improve incrementally each month. Time will tell if there are long-term issues or regression.
The only issue I have left to decide is whether to keep the monovision, or whether to get the 20/25 in the right eye further corrected so that both eyes are about 20/15. The Dr. generally doesn't like to do a repeat surgery on anything 20/40 or better, as they believe the risks outweigh the benefits. Plus, I'm actually quite happy with the monovision as it lets me avoid reading glasses, so I may just stick with it. Would be interested to hear if others have tried the monovision approach.
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