…and realized I was in the midst of a major change in my life.
I wasn’t looking for my glasses, concerned about how my contact felt. irritated with myself for having slept with my glasses on, thinking I needed to clean some lenses or another.
Several people have talked with me about the fact that getting Lasic or PRK (the procedure I went through) was a life changing experience. I didn’t doubt them in the least, and I’m not saying that this is evidence of that. It’s just that for one of the first times, as I was getting up, I Noticed that I wasn’t doing these things, and had a moment of personal celebration.
Is it something I would do again? Yes. I don’t know how I would go about setting things up differently, but definitely I would do it again.
As a reminder, I started out with a correction difference of about -8 diopters in each eye. Anything beyond about 6″ from my eyes was completely out of focus if I didn’t have glasses or contacts in. I could not read a book without glasses.
Well, OK if I held the book or paper within 6″ I could read, but you then run into parallax issues. Essentially what that means is that I could bring one eye into focus on what I was reading, but the amount of effort to get the other eye to actually look at the same word, and also focus was often impossible. Reading a page involved not just moving the page up for each line, but also moving my face across each line (or the page) as I could not focus on the entire line at once.
No what I have now is not perfect. And there were a few advantages to having vision that worked at such tight quarters as that. An advantage? I could, without a loop, see details in jewelery that many might miss entirely. Of course I had to hold it close to see that, but then so does a jeweler. The thing is, I don’t work in the jewelery business. I don’t buy and sell it, I don’t make jewelery, and I don’t expect to do so any time soon. And beyond that, there isn’t enough of a call for those capabilities.
There is a lot of talk out there about the difference between plain Lasic or PRK and Wavefront enhanced. From what I understand, I did not get Wavefront enhanced. Part of why, at least for my left eye, was that my correction is so strong that the advantages do not outweigh the extra work involved. Additionally it seems that the technology was not able to work with my pupils being as small as they were when they were doing the measurements. Yes they could dilate the eyes, but that does affect several other measurements, including the controls on the laser. It turns out that the laser equipment will abort the procedure if the pupil is dilated too much when it is trying to do it’s work. So for me the result was a straight prk procedure.
Now as to the ‘not exactly perfect.’ I do need reading glasses when looking at small text. I can work around that to some degree on computers. For example the text I’m writing this at my computer with is a 12 point text rather than 10 point. As my eyes heal, I may get some of that near focus back. However I knew going in that near focus would be a problem.
So I have several pairs of reading glasses available to me. and that works well for now. But I’m not putting them on first thing in the morning. Wearing them all day. Completely blind while cleaning them. Soaking them for 8 hours in a protein remover. (Contacts) Making sure that they have been cleaned of the protein remover before putting them in my eye. Perfect? No, but I wasn’t expecting that anyway.
I also have several pairs of glasses specifically for going outside. Sun glasses of course. UV will cause problems with the healing process. But also of concern is dust and stuff in the air. Drying due to a breeze or even the defroster/defogger on the windshield of the car. And so on. So since there is a lot of my life that is spent at night, I also have a couple of pairs of no-tint sunglasses, or safety glasses. I’m a little concerned about mercury vapor lights and florescent lighting, as both emit UV in addition to the light that lets you see about you, but not at the levels that the sun does, at least not unless I suddenly take up an interest in tanning beds and booths. (Which is fairly unlikely I think.)
Life changing? Yes. I’m seriously hoping that it is significantly life improving as well. But that’s another post. 
