Posts Tagged "LASIK"

Dad, what’s wrong with your eyes? (LASIK)

Posted by Dad on Nov 16, 2007 in Dad Issues | 2 comments

I took the plunge! I had LASIKs done yesterday and now I can see without glasses for the first time in 25 years. Well, still a bit blurry but I can see!

The procedure is really quite simple. You sit back in a chair and they numb your eyes with drops. Oh, I forgot to mention that they give you a very helpful Valium pill before. Then they place this bracket that holds your eye open and still.

You are whirled under a machine that creates a million tiny bubbles between your cornea and the cornea cover. It is a laser so you don’t feel anything. It takes about 10 seconds to create a flap of the cornea cover. The doctor then uses a very thin tool to carefully lift your cornea cover back revealing your cornea.

You are whirled under another laser that fires for about 15 seconds. It literally corrects any refractive errors caused by the shape of your cornea. It reshapes it. Then the doctors flips back the flack and with a tiny brush makes sure there are no bubbles underneath it. Your eye is covered and they go on to the next one.

I was done in 15 minutes. They place two eye shields over your eyes that you are to leave on until the next morning. They tell you to come back the next day so that the doctor can check you out and they send you home with someone else driving. At that point, I could see better than I used to without glasses but things were very blurry.

On the drive home, the anesthesia was wearing off and my eyes began to hurt. Nothing too terrible but certainly significant discomfort. It was like sand was in your eyes and you begin to tear uncontrollably. They tell you to sleep for 4-5 hours to avoid the worst of it.

Two tylenol PMs and a Valium did the trick for me. I was knocked out for 4 hours. When I woke, the worst was, in fact, over. I still felt them a little but the terrible discomfort was gone. I began putting the drops they send you home with and spent the rest of the night looking like ET to my children. Mostly, they laughed.

I took the shields off this morning and viola! Although still slightly blurry, I’m seeing as well as I saw with my glasses. It’s simply amazing. I highly recommend it to anyone one of you considering it.

Oh, and if your reaching (or have reached) that magic age (40) when you begin to lose the ability to read things that are close (presbyopia), what they do is under-correct your less dominant eye. So they leave you somewhat myopic in one eye so that you will be able to read things up close without needed reading glasses.

Let me know if you have any questions.

All the best!

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