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Laser eye surgery – a personal account

Miraculous!

That’s the only word to describe lasik laser eye surgery. Actually, uncomfortable also describes it pretty well.

I didn’t go blind. Far from it. Less than 24 hour after the procedure and I have better than 20/20 vision. OK, my vision is a little hazy and my eyes hurt a little bit because essentially they are still recovering from injury, but I no longer need to wear glasses.

I met Phil at the clinic in Parson’s Green at 2:30pm. We had to have a quick eye test to make sure that our eyes hadn’t changed in the 6 months since our initial consultation.

If you have an image of the clinic as a hospital ward, it’s nothing like that. A stylish, well appointed waiting room. Comfy chairs, big screen plasma TV with rolling news and good tea and coffee on tap.

It is a little bit of a production line and all the staff are slick and professional. So while Phil and I got on with chatting about Meagan’s party in Kingston at the weekend, we were whisked off here and there to meet the surgeon, be briefed on aftercare, sign our consent forms, and then finally into the treatment room for the procedure itself.

Which is not very nice. Have no illusions. This is Laser. Eye. Surgery. You are awake and there is no way to do this without staring up at the laser beam. If I ever make a film about alien abduction, it will look like the experience of having lasik.

So I’m lying there, trying to stay as calm as I can and relax as much as possible. Not easy when the surgeons are clamping your eye open and you’re seeing it all coming. Then comes the aesthetic and something very weird. A scalpel thingy on some kind of runner comes down and skrr skrr, you KNOW that they’ve just cut a flap right through your cornea. Then the weirdest bit. Some tweezers come down and you actually see the flap of your cornea being peeled back and your vision suddenly goes completely blurred.

2 more minutes. The laser is positioned and then zzzt zzzt. There’s a slight smell of burnt pork as human tissue is burned away, but it’s done in a split second. Then the flap is closed, a contact lens put over the wound is cleaned and bosh. Job done. On to the other eye.

That’s it, you’re done. Like I say. Not nice. But you can live with it.

Next step is to go back out to the waiting room and hang about for 15 mins with your eyes closed. All the better if you’ve got a mate there you can chat to. Another quick check up and some eye drops and you’re good to go. We were both finished by 4pm.

I’d booked a B&B just up the road to make things easier. You need to be back in the clinic for a check-up the next morning and you don’t want to be buggering around on the tube.

It was cold outside and my eyes hurt. When the aesthetic wore off later in the afternoon they hurt more, but the antibiotic eye drops you need to put in every hour soothed & helped a lot.

A couple of hours of recovery and Phil and I were well enough to go out for dinner. After a nice bottle of wine at Strada in Parson’s Green it didn’t hurt at all and we both started to notice how well we could see. Like we used to see with our glasses.

So yes. This morning my eyes hurt a bit, but I’d had contacts in over night and I’ve never worn them before, but having the optician check my prescription again and tell me I had better than 20/20 vision. Well, quite frankly it’s well worth a little bit of discomfort.

A thousand pounds well spent too. All of a sudden I’m thinking about what other kinds of elective surgery I can have. Maybe I’ll put my name down for a liquid titanium double ‘ard exo-skeleton so I’m first in the queue when they get invented

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