Re: Post Lasik Despair & Blurred Vision

More than 4 months later and this is what I have learned / experienced:

Lasik hurts. I found it to be very painful for that first 6 hours. This is experienced by about 50% of patients I am told.

The first Lasik procedure did not achieve the desired correction. This happens about 8% of the time I am told. I was provided a pair of glasses and we waited until mid-April for vision to completely stabilize before going for the second correction.

The second correction in late April went great - for about 18 hours. My vision was 20/15 at the next day follow up (at 0800). It was also observed that both my eyes were infected. Apparently that's about a 1 in 5000 chance. I feel soooooo lucky.

They took me back to surgery, opened the flaps again and scraped my corneas so they could grow cultures. I then spent the next 24 hours putting 3 kinds of drops in my eyes every hour, spaced five minutes apart. Follow up on next day showed no improvement and I was switched to 2 alternative anti-fungal drugs, again every hour, five minutes apart, for 24 hours. It was a painful, dismal experience and now, almost a month later, I am still using one form of anti-fungal drops, plus steroids to fight the persistent inflammation that the medications cause.

The infection was a potentially vision ending event. I was fortunate in that my Doctors were able to defeat it and that the scarring that occurred is on the outer periphery of my vision and not dead-center. The white hazy scars on my corneas are visible to the naked eye.

My vision is approaching 20-20 and I hope it will stabilize there once I am finally off all eye medications. Given what I know now and of course in light of what I have experienced I would NEVER do lasik if I could go back and do it over again.

I don't care if I end up wearing glasses - I'm never letting anyone F with my eyes again as long as I live.