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I'm finally biting the bullet and investing in laser eye surgery, anything I should know?
I've done a large amount of research and got a consultation a few months ago, my doctor said I could get PRK as SMILE and LASIK weren't good options for my cornea. As I understand it the results should be very similar, just a longer/more painful recovery time. I've got family who is going to come into town for a week to help me with anything, but I wanted to know if any of you have gone through PRK and had advice or an experience to share.
it can “wear off” and if you have thin corneas they may not be able to do a touch up. It’s still life changing surgery even if it reverts if you have terrible vision. But if you just have minor corrections my advise would be to save the money.
It's not that it wears off, but that you got it too young. The shape of your eyes will continue to change well into your 20's and maybe early 30's. A regular optometrist will tell you that you need to wait until you've had two consecutive yearly appointments where your prescription has not changed. That's the number one sign that your vision has stabilized. The surgery consultations can't really tell you if your vision is stable, just if your eligible to have the surgery.
Also regardless of having the surgery or not, everyone will need reading glasses when they get older. That's because of the muscles around your eyes getting weaker. Which makes it harder to focus your eyes on small text.
You're better off doing yearly eye check ups and waiting until your eye prescription stops changing before spending the money and time on surgery.
I was 37 when i got it and had a stable prescription for ten years. And got checked up every year.
You made a lot assumptions of ignorance instead of trusting me to understand my own experience.
You should know that forum discussion frequently targets the general audience in replies. Don't assume the person replying is directly talking to you unless it's very obvious. Yes this is a direct reply.
I shouldn't have said "you". But still your original comment did not explain what you meant by "wear off". The phrase perpetuates a common misconception people have about eye surgery. Hence why i went into more detail
how is it a misconception when I have literally lived it? it did wear off and i am in no way special so it could very well happen to others.
Physical reshaping of your lens cannot physically "wear off." That was their point. Nobody said you haven't experienced what you've experienced, they're just explaining that what you think happened cannot be what actually happened.
I am not an ophthalmologist, so I will not speculate on your eyes. I don't need to be an optometrist, however, to know that laser eye surgery doesn't wear off. It can't, because your lenses are a different physical shape now than they were before. Whatever happened to you, there is an explanation. This particular explanation may not cover your specific case, but that does not mean that lens reshaping wears off. Cause it doesn't.
the body is a static thing that does not change. what was once done can never be undone right?
of course not. the distinction of the surgery wearing off vs the effects of the surgery wearing off seems a bit pedantic.
Au contraire, it’s a critically important distinction.
If you were asking for advice on an elective, permanent modification to your eyeballs, wouldn’t you want to be absolutely certain of the risks? Your vision deterioration could be entirely unrelated to the surgery. If that is the case, then presenting it as a downside to PRK is both inaccurate and misleading.
In broader terms, the “why” is always important. “Why” is the difference between us and beasts, it is the root of reason. Pedantry is excessive concern with unimportant details. I don’t feel that being perfectly clear on the pros and cons of a permanent surgery is unimportant.
As Cdr. Data so succinctly put it, “The most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom is: I do not know.”
Your eyesight would have degraded even more without the surgery. Your eyes naturally degrade as you age as the lense in your eye becomes less able to flex. That's different than if, say, your cornea slowly regrew itself to undo the correction from the surgery. That would be "wearing off".
Let's say your eyes in an abstract sense are a 5/10 presurgery. After the surgery it's an 8/10. If you didn't get the surgery, as you age it would go to a 3/10. Because you did the surgery, it's back to a 5/10. Even though it's back to where it was before, it's an unfair comparison to compare your old eyes with your young eyes.
It's not wearing off, because the surgery is still having an affect.
Minor correction: the reason you need reading glasses is because the lens stiffens and can’t flex, not because of the muscles weakening
My vision isn't completely terrible but it's gotten to the point where I no longer feel comfortable doing anything other than lazing around without my glasses.
As far as I'm aware my corneas aren't thin, just irregular? Not sure if that's the same thing. The money isn't a huge issue, it's not like it's nothing but I believe the gain is well worth the price if it ends up lasting a while.
I've been in a similar situation to yours. I was 30, had a stable prescription with astigmatism and uneven cornea due to allergies. My PRK surgery went fine and 2 weeks later I had better than 20/20 vision. It's been several years and I'm still enjoying every minute of it, and I still have better than 20/20. I would do it again in a heartbeat. Make sure you get plenty of eye drops and audio books for the long recovery process. The recovery for PRK is rougher than lasik but nothing to be concerned about. Just take time off work and screens to heal properly. The only downside today is that my eyes still get dry more easily than they used to. I make sure to hydrate well and keep a small thing of eyedroppers handy and it's never been a problem.
Already stocking up on audiobooks haha, looking forward to the break honestly.
Do you know if it's a bad idea to use marijuana during the recovery? Seems like it'd help the relaxing part a lot.
It might dry up your eyes so I'd say no. Sorry, I know that's a bummer.
Haha fair enough
I did lasik. Make sure you get a second opinion on options, just to make sure the MD is 100% correct on what’s right for your eyes.
For lasik, recovery wasn’t bad at all. Don’t have experience with PRK unfortunately. Best of luck!
I also agree with getting a second opinion. I only have second-hand knowledge, as it was my husband who had the surgery, but a second opinion could have saved him a lot of discomfort and time.
He was told he was a candidate for LASIK, so he went ahead and scheduled the procedure. Day of the surgery arrives and they start the process - not even 10 minutes in they aborted the surgery. His cornea was too thin. He ended up having to heal from the portion they did complete before going back in for PRK.
I had PRK a few years ago and would absolutely do it again. Follow the instructions for post-op care and honestly the recovery wasn't too painful or anything like that, you just feel like you have scratchy/irritated eyes a bit. The strangest thing was that before the surgery, everything is blurry but you can make things clearer by putting on glasses or getting closer (nearsighted). After surgery while the epithelial layer is healing everything is equally blurry regardless of distance and your glasses don't work anymore. Within 36-48 hours it was noticeably improved and i'd say completely normal in a week or 10 days. Being able to see clearly before going to bed and first thing in the morning, in the shower/pool/ocean, it's just life changing. I'm sure everyone's experience is different but I would do it again no question.
One of my kids goaded me out onto a diving board yesterday for the first time since I was a kid. Looking down from the board and not being able to see the water below me was more than a bit disorienting so I couldn't convince myself to do more than simple jumps off the board -- no diving. I don't trust corrective eye surgeries enough to try one, but thinking about being able to see in situations like on the diving board does make it tempting!
Be very, very careful about LASIK. Consultations vary extremely wildly. There are surgeons who recommend PRK, SMILE, ICL, and other different procedures. Even in the same clinic, but different surgeons, the recommends can vary wildly. You will need to get multiple opinions from multiple surgeons to get a better view of what's actually appropriate for you. Furthermore, you need to be absolutely sure your eyesight grade is stable.
I've had LASIK using Femto LASIK. My left eye became incredibly sharp (eagle eye condition), which made it hard to read near text. My right developed fuzziness (imagine the letter 'T' becoming the letter 'F'). Ever since LASIK, I've been having vision-based headaches and migraines. Honestly, if I could've not gotten LASIK, I wouldn't have gotten it. I would've preferred to just stick with glasses or contact lenses.
PRK changed my life and was the best investment I ever made in myself because my vision was terrible. So when recovery gets tough, remember that it’s worth it.
With PRK, they remove a bit of your cornea (as opposed to LASIK where they make a flap and put it back). Your eye will be completely numb, but it feels like an electric toothbrush on your eyeball to gently buff it away. That part was weird, and no one had mentioned that particular sensation to me.
Since they remove your cornea, recovery is essentially growing it back. For a few days, it feels like there is a hair in your eye. I had the most discomfort while blinking, so I mostly laid around listening to podcasts with my eyes closed. My vision was blurry for the first days, then every day it got better and better. It took about 2 weeks to get my vision to its sharpest, but I went back to work after 5 days.
They’ll give you different eye drops to use at different intervals: I just set up alarms on my phone the night before, so it was really easy to remember.
I had surgery in 2017 and since I have irregular corneas like you, and it has worn off a bit. If you have astigmatism already, your eyeballs will continue to elongate and there’s not much you can do. But PRK brought me from being so nearsighted I couldn’t even read books anymore to only needing glasses to drive at night. It really did change my life and I’m a huge advocate for it.
I did pretty much zero research. Which was stupid. I don't even know what the procedure was called. Afterwards, my sight without glasses has gone from totally blurry to pretty much okay. Still, things further away are still a bit blurry, so I choose to wear glasses anyway, and my previous super-closeup sight (near-sightedness) is gone.
Also (this is pure amateur guesswork) chipping away parts of the cornea makes it smaller, resulting in a narrower field of view, which is a downside, but also results in less light going in, causing the iris to expand, resulting in a more blurry sight.
In retrospect, I wished I had prepared some direct questions, like "after the operation, how close can text get to my eyes for me to comfortably read it?" or "compared to when I used glasses, will things in the horisont be clearer or more blurry?" or "what will my field of view be?" or "How much loss will there be to my night vision?"
I'm not sure that's a thing. For one, just from a bird's eye view it doesn't really make sense, what would control your FoV is the size of your pupil, not modifications to your cornea, which sits atop it. Myopia is caused when your eye cannot properly focus at far distances - the correction is correcting that. Additionally, due to the r^2 law, the closer to the eye, the more minor the modifications are. That's why a lense of diopter, say, 5 is quite thick in glasses, but is imperceptibly thin in a contact lense. Part of why laser eye surgery is possible at all is that the changes to your cornea are extremely minor.
I did a quick google and did not see any sources claiming that laser eye surgery can decrease your FoV.
As far as I know, that's not how it works. The pupil expand when it gets dark, and contract when it is light (you can test this with your mobile phone light in front of a mirror) but despite this, you don't get a wider field of view when it get dark. Changing the aperture on a camera doesn't change the field of view either.
Other than than, you sounds like you know your stuff. I can't really eyeball if the changes are too minor to impact the field of view. The guy testing my operated eyes asked me if I could see that thinks were closer now, AKA narrower field of view. Still, I can't find any source for it online either.
You can also consider ICL, which is another type of corrective eye surgery, that is sort of more recent. It's more invasive as a surgery, but unlike PRK/LASIK it is reversible (if you suffer side effects), and it supposably has the least side effects. In practice, it is very similar to cataract surgery, so while not as many practices do it, the ones that do are fairly good at it. It's an option, at least.
The most confusing part of corrective eye surgery is that you can go to 5 different eye clinics and get 5 different recommendations, each brutally contradicting the other.
Have you had ICL yourself? When I first heard about it (quite a while ago now), I was really interested and thought I'd just wait for its inevitable takeoff and price decrease, but it never seemed to gain much traction.
I got PRK in summer 2021 after thinking about it for around 2 years and reading a lot of other people's stories and various scientific papers about LASIK. I also watched videos of people getting the surgery on YouTube. Great life choice and I don't regret it since I got good results (my vision is now above average). But you have to remember that it's a cosmetic surgery and there are risks. If you understand the risks and are fine with them, then go for it. Personally I had accepted that I might end up with life-long issues or maybe even blindness.
I got mine at a LASIK MD in Canada.
Here are my notes:
Some things I noticed over time:
During the first week, I pretty much kept my eyes closed for the whole week. I focused 100% on having a good recovery. I listened to a bunch of podcasts. I remember that I listened to the Violet Evergarden audio which was good to make my eyes watery (😭). The Agro Squirrel Narrates channel is awesome. His reading style is pretty unique.
Oh and my eyes were a bit worst than -7/-7 with some astigmatism in both eyes which they were also able to correct.
I noticed that before the surgery, my glasses were a large part of my identity. For the past 2 years, I don't really think about my eyes anymore though I wear sunglasses when I go outside.
Edit: Oh btw you can ask your doctor how much cornea you'll have left after and also ask if they'll be able to do touch ups later.
Edit2: I would recommend taking notes before you go for your appointment with all the questions you want to ask. As I was reading stuff online, I was taking a lot of notes with things to verify. By the time I got the surgery, I knew pretty much everything that was going to happen so I didn't get any surprises. I also took a lot of notes after with follow up questions after the surgery.
Edit3: Something that I didn't know about UV protection, you can have sunglasses that aren't tinted. For my peace of mind, I wore the Uvex S3300X Genesis XC Safety Eyewear glasses in-door for a while. It's probably overkill but I did it anyway since PRK removes the Bowman’s layer which might be linked with UV protection? Uvex also sells some other sunglasses so I picked some of their other pairs too since they cover a wide angle and they have a lot of different shades.
It's one of the biggest quality of life procedures I've ever had; I had it maybe 12 years ago now. The experience varies from person to person and hopefully it's better now, but man, I was in some serious pain for days afterwards and the procedure felt traumatic.
I went from -1.75 to near 0 (lasik) and it was the best money I’ve ever spent. Now I’m getting frighteningly close to 50 I need varifocals to read comfortably and am seriously considering going back to get a blended vision prescription done which should/could keep me specs free into my 70s.
The only negative I can think of is night vision whilst driving got a bit worse as you get starry effects on lights
I have no experience with PRK so YMMV
I had PRK two years ago and I'd do it again. I can still see well up close, just not maybe as super up close as I used to, but now I can also see really far and very clearly without glasses. My eyes do dry up at night when I sleep, so I take eye drops every night before bed, but that's the only side effect. I never even realised how much of a pain glasses were until I didn't have to wear them anymore.
I did my research, I went to the clinic with the best laser, and I got two separate opinions (both doctors suggested PRK over LASIK). I kept my eyes closed for three days following the surgery and avoided all screens for 2 weeks.
Hi, I'm an optometrist in New Zealand. You've already had lots of interesting comments to your post already, but I thought I'd add my two cents anyway.... In my experience nearly everyone who has vision corrective surgery is glad they had it. I can only think of two exceptions. One travelled overseas for cheap LASIK, subsequently had problems and it was a major drama to sort out. The other was also LASIK, had his surgery done by a reputable local ophthalmologist but ended up with severe chronic dry eye problems afterwards, to the point that he was reliant on lubricant drops every hour and it made him pretty miserable. PRK should have a lower risk of that type of adverse effect because it treats the more superficial part of the cornea and therefore doesn't disrupt as many of the corneal nerves.
In short, go for it!
As others have mentioned, be fastidious in following your post-op care instructions and I'm confident you will have a great experience (although be aware of the very small, but non-zero chance that something could go wrong). Best of luck :)
Absolutely love to have a comment from a optometrist, thank you! The horror stories are a bit scary but from everything I've seen it's the vast vast minority of experiences. I guess it's better to hear about them so you know the risks.
I'm fairly confident going into this, so I'll just keep my fingers crossed and do everything I can to stay in good shape, thanks :)
I haven't had it done yet, but am seriously considering having PRK done within the next few years.
I would recommend watching this video by LTT's Taran about his experience
In got LASIK in the late 90s and it was life changing. Just need to make sure you follow all the post op drops, etc. I’ve had to have 2 surgeries in one eye and 3 in the other eye. Eyes naturally change so it won’t stay perfect forever. Also once you hit middle age you’ll still need reading glasses. I do have some starbursts driving at night but I’m used to it now
I had LASIK about 5 years ago. I remember discussing PRK and was told the same that it is more painful/ longer recovery. I think I would have still gone through with it if they had recommended PRK. I do use rewetting drops 1 to 2 times a day, where I didn’t have to before. I also occasionally use reading glasses now which I was told would happen. Still, not having to reach for my glasses first thing in the morning was worth it for me.
I had SMILE two years ago, which is variant of LASIK. I don't regret the choice one bit. I happened to have thick corneas so they had plenty of room to work with and likely still have room to do touchups if necessary.
The biggest advice I'll give is that during the recovery period should just be time for you to rest your eyes. That means staying away (as much as possible) from screens and small print. If you work all day on a computer, just take that time off. You want to avoid eye strain as much as possible during recovery.
I've heard that LASIK is less painful and has a quicker recovery time than LASEK. Other than that, I'm not so sure.
I am shortsighted and it's getting increasingly worse as time goes on. I have debated on laser eye surgery but at the time I am so used to wearing glasses that I think 'fuck the idea of having lasers shot into my retinas or jamming contacts into my eye sockets.'
I came across this website a while ago: https://www.lasikcomplications.com