Hi,
I am a long term HN member writing under an anonymous account as this is a somewhat personal issue for me.
I have been short-sighted (myopia of about -5.00 in both eyes) all my life, and generally wear both contact lenses and glasses. I find contact lenses really irritate my eyes when programming (dry eyes due to less blinking when on computer) and am fed up of issues with glasses (steaming, cleaning, etc) and recently have been considering laser eye surgery.
I live in the UK, and have booked consultations at the 3 main providers here - UltraLase, Optimax, Optical Express. I'll write my assessment of them each later once I go for my consultation with the last provider at the end of the month, but so far have concluded that one has to really research the area to avoid much of the nonsense that they tell patients especially with regard to equipment and surgeons used and why e.g. Ultralase charge £4700 for lasik+intralse+wavefront and say they use new Bausch & Lomb lasers that has higher resolution (dpi) and better surgeons (but ironically most of them are ex-Optimax surgeons) but Optimax charge £2395 for a similar lasik+intralase+wavefront procedure but say they use Nidek lasers as gives better results (even though it is older generation device) and they are cheaper as they already bought their machines and premises and have less ongoing overheads.
Anyway, I was wondering if any other HN members have had laser eye surgey (or thought about it and why you did not do it), what prodcedure you took (e.g. Lasek, Lasik, with Wavefront and/or Intralase), what your experience was like, what equipment was used (e.g. Visx, Nidek, Alegretto), and whether you researched this and what your thoughts are about various equipment-factors in the final result, and most importantly your surgeon and final result.
Thank you!
I went to a highly recommended surgeon in my area. I had the procedure done using a machine that didn't have eye tracking, so I had to look straight ahead and not move my eyes during the procedure. I must have done something wrong because my eyesight had some...issues.
All the visual anomalies they'll warn you about in your consultation (halos and starbursts), I had in spades. They were so bad I had trouble functioning in dark settings. So walking around at night was difficult, watching movies was awful, and so forth.
My vision DID kick ass though otherwise.
My surgeon had me coming in regular to monitor my progress, and when things weren't getting better scheduled a touch-up (all included in the initial cost). After the touch-up, all the problems were resolved, and 6-7 years later my vision is still pretty damn good. I don't need glasses, but my vision took a tiny dip a year after the surgery and maintained the quality ever since.
So with all that said, would I recommend Lasik? Absolutely. First, the technology has come a long way since then. Two, my brother had the surgery the same time I did from the same surgeon, and his turned out fine the first time. Third, having perfect vision is something I'm still thankful for all this time later.
tl;dr - I had Lasik surgery twice. First time gave me problems seeing at night, a subsequent touch-up fixed the problems. I still recommend the surgery, but when they say problems can happen, BELIEVE IT.