I had LASIK about four years ago. I don’t have any problems at all. I had the halo and starbursts right after surgery, but that went away after a couple of months. My eyes were really bad too, -12 in both! It’s great. I love being able to see and not worring about contacts when my allergies bother me. It was money very well spent.
Oh, I should also add that I am now 20/20 in the left and 20/25 in the right.
Not correct. LASIK is now an approved procedure, in both the U.S. and Canada. You have to wait for three months after the surgery or until your vision has stabilized, and then you have to have better than 20/40 corrected vision. You can even get a commercial license if your eyes are better than 5 diopters uncorrected.
I don’t have a lot of advice for this thread but, from unfortunate experience, I can say “Avoid any place that’s too eager to do the surgery, if your eyes aren’t stable.”
My mom and my grandparents began pushing laser eye surgery on me as soon as we found out I would need glasses, when I was in the third grade. They just thought it was horrible that I’d have to wear glasses and contacts all my life. The first age bandied about was 16, then 18. I didn’t particularly want the surgery, because glasses didn’t bother me, but I wasn’t so attached to them that I would turn down a chance to get rid of them. I agreed to it, and my over-eager eye doctor agreed to do it as soon as I managed to get two eye exams with the same prescription. That was my freshman year of college.
I had only the normal discomfort following the surgery, and I could see fine for a while. I can’t pinpoint the exact time my vision started to go, but by my senior year of college, I was having unambiguous problems reading scoreboards, street signs and library signs. My eyes are back to where they were.
My dad had one eye done as part of the federal approval trials… um, more than 10 years ago… 15? Has it been that long? At the time he was bedridden and bandaged for more than 2 weeks.
He now uses one eye to see distance and one eye to read.
My mom had both eyes done last year and was back at work that afternoon. She had one short follow-up surgery a few weeks later to fine tune things.
Well, the general trend of responses here have been positive and that’s helping alleviate some of my worrying. I guess a person will get anxious when it comes to surgery, no matter what type it is. I’ve picked a doctor I’m going with and I’ll call them tomorrow. Does anyone have a ballpark figure on how much this will cost? Should I watch out for people offering low low prices?
I paid about $2500 total. That included all followup doctor visits for a year, and also any followup “touch-up” surgeries, if they’d turned out to be needed.
Yes. Yes you should. See my previous comment about “Jim-Bob’s Burger House ‘n’ Eye Surgery”.