At Long Last, LASIK (Part 1)

My mom got LASIK before we moved to Sacra­mento, and I’ve been think­ing about it for sev­eral years now. Since I recently got a decent and sta­ble pay­check, I decided to finally do some seri­ous research on it.

I went online to see what the state of the art treat­ments were and how much it was going for. Then I sched­uled a series of con­sults with doc­tors in the Bay. Some friends saw my series of tweets about the con­sults and asked me to write a post about it when I was all done. This is my attempt at sum­ma­riz­ing every­thing. (Please keep in mind, I am not a med­ical pro­fes­sional and these posts are merely my rec­ol­lec­tion of per­sonal experience.)

When I went in for the ini­tial con­sult and screen­ings, the dif­fer­ent doc­tors basi­cally all did the same tests on me:

First, I had to look into a machine that mea­sured my basic eye pre­scrip­tion. This is the one that has a pic­ture of a red barn or hot air bal­loon on the hori­zon and goes in and out focus as you stare at it. Some offices con­firmed this by mea­sur­ing the pre­scrip­tion of the lenses on my glasses. I believe the stan­dard sur­gi­cal lasers can han­dle pre­scrip­tions of +/​-​10.0 and astig­ma­tism of 5.0. A cou­ple doc­tors told me that they had a spe­cialty laser, the Alle­gretto, which can do up to +/-12.0 and 6.0. if your pre­scrip­tion is beyond these num­bers, I don’t think you can get laser eye surgery right now.

Then there was a a trippy machine with a red laser in the mid­dle of con­cen­tric glow­ing cir­cles that flashes some green lasers into your eye get a Wave­front scan of your pre­scrip­tion and your corneal thick­ness. The Wave­front scan gives a much more detailed mea­sure­ment of how your eye is mis­shapen, and Wave­front cor­rec­tion is much more expen­sive than reg­u­lar laser eye surgery, but is sup­posed to have much bet­ter results and much less chance of side-​effects such as glare, halos, etc. at night. Corneal thick­ness is impor­tant because the sur­geon will be cut­ting into your cornea to cor­rect your vision, so you need enough for the doc­tor to work with.

Some places use the puff machine to test the pres­sure in your eyes, but some gen­er­a­tions of the trippy scan­ner do that, too, appar­ently. Laser eye surgery increases pres­sure in your eyes dur­ing the pro­ce­dure so they want to make sure you aren’t going to have any dam­age from that.

A com­mon com­plaint from LASIK is dry eyes, so they will also do a tear test to check if you already have dry eye issues.

A lot of issues come up if the flap cut for LASIK is smaller than your pupil when dilated, so the doc­tor will also dilate your eyes and mea­sure the width of your pupil. They often redo the pre­scrip­tion tests/​scans with your eyes dilated, too.

These tests are usu­ally done by techs or assis­tants, but then you go in and either the sur­geon or an oph­thal­mol­o­gist will do the usual read­ing let­ters tests and look into your eyes for signs of pre-​existing con­di­tions or dis­eases such as glau­coma that could cause prob­lems for the surgery.

Every doc­tor I went to also checked which eye is my dom­i­nant eye, but I’m not sure why that was done.

Then the sur­geon will talk to you a lit­tle about any per­sonal con­cerns you have, make a rec­om­men­da­tion, and then send you to some admin­is­tra­tive assis­tant to talk about costs.

Still with me? That’s basi­cally what I went through every time at each of the con­sults I did. Next post: my per­sonal issues and choices.

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