Even though Matt had a good experience with his eye surgery 3 years ago, I have always told him that I couldn't get surgery on my eyes because of an endless list of excuses. It made me nervous. The idea of having one of those clamp things hold my eye open was not appealing. The thought of being awake and alert while someone does surgery on my eyes didn't sound to fun either. It seemed like a pain to continually put eye drops in my eyes several times an hour for months following surgery. Maybe my best excuse was the roughly $5000 cost of surgery during a time that we were trying to save money.
It all started when Matt called home one day from work to ask if I knew of anyone that wanted to get PRK surgery done. The Wilford Hall Refractory Surgery Center was doing a research study with the pain medication Lyrica and were including dependents. Normally refractive surgery is only available to active duty military, but sometimes it is opened up to dependents when there is a research study. After thinking about it and talking with some of my family members, I decided that I should go for it. My really big excuse of cost was gone. It happened very quickly. Matt got me in to be evaluated the next day. I passed that part, my eyes looked pretty good. The following day was a 4 hour briefing about the surgery and filling out paperwork. Then, I had the weekend to worry about everything and wonder about what had I gotten myself into. I had been pretty happy wearing glasses. Was I going to regret this?
Fortunately, the week of surgery turned out to be a good week for Matt to take a few days off to help me out. Monday morning May 17th I went in for surgery. Matt came in to the laser suite during the surgery. The actual surgery went quickly and wasn't as bad as I expected. The recovery, on the other hand, was significantly worse than I expected.
I had to rest my eyes for the week, no watching TV or getting on the computer and try to do lots of sleeping. I had to go in every day for the next week for follow up appointments.
Results:
Monday - surgery day
Tuesday - very painful
Wednesday - could barely open my eyes, very sensitive to light, I had to have Matt help me put drops in.
Thursday - starting to feel a little better, very blurry vision
Friday - check-up, very blurry, no more pain, cleared to drive 20/25 and 20/40 don't feel very comfortable driving
The next weeks I felt like my vision was blurry and wasn't getting better. It was hard to see in places with a lot of detail like grocery stores. It was hard to search for certain products on the shelf. It was hard to look at the computer. I couldn't look at it very long. I was getting headaches because I felt like I was straining my eyes. I was thinking that I would end up getting glasses again.
1 month post-op my vision fluctuates, I will be clear and then blurry, I feel like I am still not seeing clearly, still hard to see details, still hard to look at the computer for more than 5 minutes
I was reassured by the optometrist that is normal and I would clear up after I stop taking the steroid eye drops. It would be about 3 months out of the surgery when my vision should be completely clear.
2 months I feel like I am normal and can see pretty clearly. I am thinking that maybe I am happy I did this because I don't think I will have to go and get a new prescription after all.
The actual procedure didn't turn out to be as bad as I thought it would be. All the things that worried me weren't that big of a deal. The recovery was a lot more painful than I expected. It took longer to see clearly than I thought it would. It was an overall good experience and I am happy I did it.
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