Smeghead sez:
Nope nope nope. If he decides not to, I get first dibs as girlfriend. 
Dammit! And I spoke first, too.
Actually, if you decide he’s no longer worth it, that could also work…
Lasiks is so safe, they REALLY recommend doing both eyes at one. Do it, you will thank me.
Above all, cost should NOT be a factor in deciding which surgeon to trust your eyes with. This is cosmetic surgery, which means it’s more likely prone to work by fly-by-night kinda people who’d advertise that “we have that something extra that the others don’t and we’re $1500 cheaper per eye!”
Go with experience and someone who really makes an effort at informed consent. Mrs. O hasn’t had any problems with her vision since she’s had it done (full disclosure: she did have an inflammation problem in one eye briefly, but the optometrist didn’t think it was procedure-related, as it usually happens in both eyes), and we went with someone we both felt comfortable with. Sure it cost $3000, well above the rates advertised by other centers in the Post, but we really feel it was worth every penny.
Don’t assume that because one doc is cheaper, the other one is better. LASIK has really exploded in the past year, and the price wars are escalating. I had it done last April by an old high school friend who’s now an eye doc. I went to him b/c he’s now working with my long-term eye doc, and I know he’s brilliant and disciplined (also, b/c I believe that marijuana has no long term effects on motor function 
). The price then was $5,000 for both eyes - he knocked off $500 for me. I am ecstatic with the results.
I talked to him today, and his rate is now $3,600. Unless the marijuana finally kicked in, he’s still as good an eye doc now as he was then.
V.
Hey Max – you don’t mention whether your August date is to go and get the procedure done, or for them to check your eyes. You said elsewhere that your eyesight is very poor; I know lasik is best for folks with “averagely poor” eyesight, and that your eyesight needs to have remained the same for at least a year.
If you do nothing else, go to Surgical Eyes for a REALISTIC view on the procedure. Most laser eye center Web sites will speak in glowing terms and will NOT spend much time on the negatives.
Personally I would not correct my vision to 0 diopters but leave it at about 1 diopter because I find this gives me the most comfortable range most of the time. Most people spend most of their time indoors. With 1 diopter you can still see well outdoors in bright light and would only need correction for driving at night etc. But if you correct your vision to zero diopters and spend your day in an office you are going to be using reading glasses all day.
An update on the eye lasering:
Doing it in New Mexico is a go. Yesterday I drove to Clovis, NM, for my pre-op exam. All was well, I’m a good candidate, and they’re gonna shoot for 20/20. They tell me that around 95% of their patients end up with 20/40 or better.
One interesting thing about the exam: at the end, the doc used some kinda machine to measure my “corneal thickness”. She put some numbing drops in my eyes, similar drops, she told me, to those used in the actual procedure. Then, she touched this little probe against my eye several times in several places to get readings.
DAMN, those drops work. I could see the probe-thing touch my eye, and got that kinda “ripple” effect where it touched, but didn’t feel a damn thing. Too cool. If the drops used when they create the flap are that effective…well, let’s say that’s eased some of my fears.
I’m now scheduled to have the surgery in New Mexico on the 14th, with a surgeon who, they tell me, helped design some of the instruments used in the procedure. That’s experienced enough for me!
I’m getting kinda excited about it now, which is much much better than anxious or fearful. Expect a full report after the surgery’s done.
Damn. I’ll just be over here in the corner, kicking the cat out of jealousy. I’ve really got to stop opening these threads…
Let me know how it goes, Max.
About five years ago I had PRK (photo-refractive keratonomy sp?), the precursor to Lasix. I was 20/400 in both eyes and am now 20/20 in one, 20/40 in the other.
With PRK, they don’t do the “flap” thing, but actually scrape away the outer layer of your eye (epithelium…sp?). Because of that, I had to wear a “bandage contact” for a few days, which was unbearable. I could see immediately, but was in a lot of pain (they gave me Darvocet) because of the pressure of the contact. As soon as I was able to take the things out, I was fine.
Still, I would go through it all again to be able to see w/o glasses or contacts.
I was a really good candidate for PRK because I had very small astigmatism in only one eye (the one that is now 20/40), but from what my mom (RN, certified in laser at an opthamology surgical center) tells me, I would have had a much easier time with Lasix.
Good luck and good sight!
Thats great news Max. Hope it all goes well for you. Take Care and let us know how you are doing!!!
Well, kinda. Things are still in “flux”, so to speak. But I’ll get to that. Here is the whole sordid story of my eye surgery. The squeamish, people with heart conditions, pregnant women or those with young children, people allergic to Betadine, and really just about anyone who doesn’t wanna hear what it’s like getting your eye sliced open with a cigar cutter should NOT read the rest of this post.
Okay, got rid of those pansies. On with the story:
My appointment was for 6:30 AM on Monday the 14th. Because the center was in Albuquerque, and because my folks live about 90 miles north of Albuquerque, I had to wake up at about 4 AM in order to get myself cleaned up and get there on time. Now, since I’d been up until 1 AM freaking out about the surgery, I hadn’t had a whole lot of sleep. Still, I feel this was a good thing; the less aware I was of what was happening, thought I, the better.
So Mom and I get there and the place hasn’t even opened yet. We hang out for around 10 minutes until Claudia (who, by the way, is the spittin’ image of Debi Mazar) shows up and lets us in. We plunk down a $2700 check, get some instructions, and then I sit in the back for a while holding one of those little medical caps (why they gave this to me up front, rather than at the moment of surgery, is beyond me).
They wanted to do some final checks, so I basically went through the same exam I’d had in Clovis two weeks before. Whether that first exam was just a plot to make me drive for four hours and Eye Associates of New Mexico gets kickbacks from OPEC, I have no idea.
Exam concluded, I sit in a little room where there are (I am completely serious) water and juice, pretzels, snack mixes, and a window where you can watch folks have eye surgery while you snork down your peanuts. I kinda half-watch them prep the room and the laser and half-munch a pretzel to get rid of the godawful dry taste in my mouth. A masked lady came and told me they were ready for me.
The laser is mighty large. It must weigh a ton, easily, and a silver flex-tube running through the ceiling is, no doubt, an industrial cooling system. One long arm sticks out of the main unit; there are eyepieces, like those on a microscope, on top of the arm.
So I put on my little cap, take off my glasses and give them to the masked lady (the last person I look at through corrective lenses, and I still haven’t seen her face, oh the bittersweet irony…) and sit on the surgery table. The masked lady hands me one of those stress-sqeeze thingies and tells me to squeeze it whenever I want; it will remain squozen until the end of the procedure. They tell me to lie down, so I do. They ask if I’m allergic to Betadine, and I’m not. They swab over my closed eyes with Betadine, to get rid of any free little creepy-crawlies.
Now, the doctor’s here. The techs (there are two of them) swivel the table under the arm of the laser. I can see a tiny flashing pinpoint of light, surrounded by a fuzzy redness, which is the actual laser. From this point on, I am to gaze at that little flash as much as possible. My left eye is covered by a shield, affixed with a strip of tape. The doctor uses two rather large pieces of some sort of tape to affix the eyelashes of my right eye open. He then slips in the speculum (no jokes, ladies) that will hold my eyelids open fer sure fer sure. Then, I get three numbing drops (actually, this might have happened earlier, my memory on when I got which drops is kinda fuzzy). He then uses a couple of funky-looking tools to put marks on my eyes (never did ask what they use, probably some kind of bio-friendly vegetable dye). The marks help him line up the flap when he puts it back.
On to the freaky medical stuff. He positions a kinda yucky-looking (because it was a funny amber-ish color) suction cup over my eye. The cup touches my eye, and he turns on the suction. My vision goes from normal to grey to black. I can’t really feel the suction, except maybe as a sort of odd pressure at the back of my eyeball, which sounds strange. I’m focusing more on squeezing the stress-thingy. I make my only jump of the procedure when I hear a fairly loud ‘click’; the doctor told me he was just positioning the microkeratome, which is the little hickey they use to cut your eye and create the flap. I expected a ‘buzz’, not a ‘click’, so I jumped a little, no big deal.
So I hear this buzzing, and I feel a little pressure, and I can kinda feel the buzz a little bit against my face for about 5 seconds. Then, that’s it, suction cup comes off. He lays a little strip of something along the top of my eye that feels kinda wet; I guessed that it was something to protect the flap while it was open and maybe help him replace it cleanly later. Then, I sorta-kinda see him lift the flap. I say “sorta-kinda” because, when the flap goes up, my vision went way-way blurry. I could still see the red of the laser, but the spot was a lot bigger, and it looked…odd. It looked like a constantly-shifting pattern of water beads on a waxed red car; I’m only guessing, but I kinda think that may have been a direct view of my rods and cones, as struck by the laser. The doc tells me to look right at it and keep very still, and he starts shooting.
——— WARNING: FOLLOWING SENTENCE IS REALLY GROSS ———
I learned very quickly to hold my breath, because, one, it made it easier to hold still, and two, the smell of burning eyeball is pretty nasty.
——— GOD, THAT WAS DISGUSTING. BACK TO THE STORY ———
The laser was on for about 30 seconds or so, maybe a bit longer. I could hear quite clearly when the laser turned on and when it stopped. Almost as soon as the laser started shooting, I could see the red spot “condense” and get smaller, kinda like it was tightening up a bit. When it was over, the doctor surveyed everything (I’m guessing, I wasn’t exactly seeing clearly yet) and did everything backwards, repositioning the flap, putting in some wetting drops, and taking out the speculum and removing the tape on my eyelashes. Removing that tape was, by the way, the most painful part of the procedure; I now have total empathy for women who wax their eyebrows.
Then they put a new shield over my right eye and ran the same drill on my left. The doctor was mighty pleased with the results. True exchange between us: Doctor - “You’re doing great.” Me - “Thanks, it’s my first time.”
That’s it. All together, it probably took 15 minutes or less. I get swung out from under the arm and I sit up, then stand up, no dizzies or anything. They led me to a dark room to relax a bit. Being the easily-bored type, I ask them to bring my mom back so I had someone to talk to. She told me later she was worried that something had gone wrong when they came up front for her, until she saw me, and I told her I just didn’t wanna sit in the dark by myself when I could have someone to talk to. They gave me a quick test, and I could read the fourth line on the eye chart. Pretty cool, being only 5 minutes or so after surgery.
For the rest of the day, everything pretty much looked like I was looking through Vaseline-covered glasses, kinda smeared and indistinct. I used the antibiotic and moistening drops as scheduled, and wore a God-awful eye shield to sleep in for the first 4 nights after surgery (rubbing your eyes = Very Bad Thing). Not that the shield was in itself evil, but it didn’t come close to fitting right, so I woke up with nasty painful marks around my eyes. Thankfully, that part’s over.
Now, the grand finale: I wish I could say I’ve found it to be the miracle that everyone else had, but my right eye isn’t quite right. It’s still pretty fuzzy, around 20/40 according to them. They say it’ll be in flux for a few weeks yet, so maybe it’ll improve; if not, I’ll have to go back for a touch-up, which isn’t really a big deal, but it’s a pain to have to live with the fuzziness until the touch-up can be done. My left eye, the one that was worse going in, is about 20/25 right now, and, if my right eye were that, I’d be mighty happy with the results. On the plus side, I haven’t had the severe dryness problems that I’ve heard of some folks having, so that’s a positive, especially if I’ll have to do it again on the right.
Anyway, there’s the whole long sordid tale. Hope y’all found it interesting, or it eased the fears of people thinking about the surgery; the procedure itself is absolutely NOT a big deal, and, had I known it was that quick and easy, I would never have worried about it so much beforehand. And it is pretty miraculous to wake up in the morning and be able to see right away, and to go to bed without scraping contact lenses off my tired eyes first. Bottom line: if your vision blows, and you can afford it, I’d recommend it over glasses or contacts, especially if you’re young enough to enjoy the full benefits for a good long while before you’ll need reading glasses.
Okay, time to put in some drops and go to sleep. Y’all got any questions or comments, lemme have 'em.
you may wish to check out this site…
Hey, Max, congrats first of all. If you hadn’t noticed yet, I’m a wee bit envious.
But here’s a question I’ve been wondering about - do they charge extra for the touch-up or is it included as part of the package? It would really suck to have to drop another thou again.
Where I had mine done it’s a lifetime care package. In other words I never have to pay for an eye exam again. If in ten or so years, something has gone awry with the procedure (highly unlikely) then they’ll do whatever is needed at no charge to correct it. I had mine done a year ago and am 20/20 in both eyes. (I have to confess, I liked it a bit better right after the procedure when I was overcorrected to be a bit farsighted*, I liked that for driving.) My mom is finally biting the bullet and having it done; she’s suffered with hard contacts her whole life and I think she’s going to be really impressed. For sleeping I had two separate eye shields (one for each eye that looked like clear plastic vented eyepatches) that I had to tape on nightly, lol. Glad THAT didn’t last long. The thing I love best about it is being able to go swimming or ride rollercoasters without having to worry about stashing my glasses or squeezing my eyes shutso my contacts don’t get lost.
*They do this because the sight regresses a bit during the healing process, apparently. The “scab” and all that.