Had all-laser LASIK done in 2007.
Was scary, and the excimer laser sounded like a giant electrical wasp, but overall, I’ve had zero problems. Best procedure I’ve ever had done.
My older sibling had it done back then, too. No issues. 2 other close friends did the same. Not a single issue.
Give it a rest people.
Go get checked to see if you’re a valid candidate, and have the procedure done by a professional ophthalmologist with an “all-laser” setup who has more than a decade or so of experience and also has the $200,000 equipment to do it right and a lifetime contract-backed guarantee, and you will be happy with the choice you made.
Risk management isn’t solely based on how bad the outcome is but also on how likely that outcome is.
It’s a big factor considering the benefits.
My cousin had his done for like $3000 several years ago. No issues. He actually has surprisingly good vision.
https://moskowitz-eye.com/blog/lasik-safety-whistlin-diesel (The original video got taken down)
I’m not going to dissuade people from doing lasik, in theory 99% of candidates should not have any issues. Personally the complications of a failed surgery are a little too scary for me.
The other problem is that not every clinic is a morally good one. They might try to upsell lasik on a not so good candidate, and that risk is not a risk I’m willing to take.
Bob’s Discount LASIK Barn or whatever it is called down by the Confederate flag monument on the 5 had a big sign for the Nazi “America first” congressman and I feel like I wasn’t about to trust my eyes to them anyway but I especially want to avoid them now, Jesus fuck
Wasn’t considering lasik, and now never will after watching final destination 5 (if you know what I’m talking about)
And I didn’t even watch the actual scene, I had to cover my eyes and skip forward and even the hearing the dialogue before and after made me feel like… Ewwww I hated it.
Idk why I even watched these movies, I should’ve just read the wiki and noped out.
What’s the success rate? Oh yeah, over 95%. Get outta here
5% is way too high of a chance of getting permanent chronic dry eyes.
Go look at horror stories on the dry eyes subreddit and take note of the people considering a permanent solution.
Xcom players: nah. Fuck that
I feel this in my bones…
…unlike the Muton who just Neo’d his way through 4 overwatches.
meaning around 1 in 20 people who do it end up facing consequences? that sounds like quite a lot actually, at least when its about longterm health.
A little less so when the main consequence 1/20 people face is something like dry eyes.
You’ve clearly never dealt with dry eyes.
Or halos, which are just a little annoying
I just don’t mind my glasses that much that I want to put myself through this/take the risk/pay the cost. I’ve had them since I was a child, I’m used to them and as far as I know, that’s still what has the least side/adverse effects.
Yeah! This ^ Lasik doesn’t sound worth the risks at all.
I can think of two specific instances in my life when wearing glasses saved me from serious eye damage, I’m sure there were more.
You can still wear glasses, and not need them.
I live in a sunny place, so I’m never outside without wearing my sunglasses. As you’ve pointed out they’ve saved my eyes from traumatic injury at least a dozen times over the years.
I wear safety glasses when I’m working around the house with anything that could be considered a power tool (kitchen mixer, drill, etc…) and those have saved me a few times as well.
But not needing glasses, now that could be a lifesaver. I have a close relative who is basically blind without his glasses. He’s told me that if he’s in an unfamiliar place and is woken up by the fire alarm, there’s a good chance he can’t find his way out without his glasses.
also people with damage to thier cornea, like from shingles even if it made a small scar on the sclera, makes in ineligble for lasik.
I was a very early adopter, as soon as lasik came out I got it, the radial-k that preceded it couldn’t handle my prescription. It’s regressed over the intervening 30 years, but even now I wear thin light glasses and can at least sort of see without them.
You know what sold me on this, even though the vision isn’t as good as I could get with hard contacts? My mom had to go back to glasses after wearing contacts for years because the contacts wore away her corneas! At least the glasses I have to wear at this age are only like a -2 prescription, that’s much more comfortable than what they would have been.
My mom had to go back to glasses after wearing contacts for years because the contacts wore away her corneas!
That’s a slightly horrifying thought… My wife has keratoconus and has to wear hard contacts (scleral lenses, but functionally the same thing) in order to see at all.
Yeah it was unsettling.
My hope lies with science. Two women at my work had to have cornea replacement and both of them don’t need glasses at all anymore - one is 65 and one is 70.
And oh yes I was profoundly nearsighted and hard contacts gave me superhuman vision. They are the best correction by far. But I am really hoping that good artificial corneas are available soon.
at work
70
Excuse me wtf?
Welcome to the USA.
She is planning to retire in a couple of years. Both of them say this is their last job.
MURICA, land of the freedom to die at work.
yeah the lady who I taught how to use the new computerized inventory system was like 74 or something. muricaaaa
Duplicate post, sorry
I did it because I was blind. Hella blind. -6 and -9. When covid hit I suddenly realized that if supply shortages ever hit hard and I lost my glasses, I was absolutely fucked.
I could not drive, I could not use two monitors, I would be functionally blind… I always joked I would be dead weight in the apocalypse but in the midst of a hurricane, a wildfire, I could be absolutely fucked. With months before a replacement pair could be acquired. And with all the shit that went wrong with covid… I just wanted to hedge my bets.
if supply shortages ever hit hard and I lost my glasses, I was absolutely fucked.
And the results? Did you died?
Went perfect. Although I had a friend who went same weekend. It did NOT. Couldn’t peel the first layer of the eye.
Otherwise I have full 20/20 vision. No side affects.
It was so WEIRD though. I felt like I was on an assembly line. The process was so fast.
no but he will… probably of old age the poor fella 😔
You missed the part where not all LASIK procedures are “bladeless”. As in: there is an eye knife and guess which way you gotta look for that to work.
Bonus:
Have had it done, bladed. Yes, you look straight at it, but you can’t see shit anyway because of the drops they put in your eyes first. I was much less concerning than I expected.
That was only for one eye though. The other was not a candidate for LASIK, so I had the alternative procedure known as PRK. This one is super fun because instead of cutting the cornea off then put it back on (LASIK), they just scrape off the outer layer of the cornea.
Yeah, the vision during the procedure was not an issue at all. The smell of burnt eye as the laser works away was a bit off putting though. I can attest that burnt eye smells a lot similar to burnt hair.
I don’t have eye problems of any kind. Don’t even need reading glasses…
And even I cried upon reading this.
just wait you’ll get there
As if I didn’t have enough reasons to avoid that procedure.
- I can wake up and glance at the time instead of having to lift something up and put it centimetres from my face to tell the time.
- I can do sports without the glasses falling off, getting mashed into my face, etc.
- I look a lot better, with a -13 prescription, my glasses were heavy and thick
- My nose and ears aren’t in pain from carrying the weight of my glasses all the time.
- I’m not having to constantly adjust my glasses whenever my nose sweats a bit.
- I’m not completely blind any time I have to take off the glasses, like when I take a shower or go in a pool, or especially swim in the ocean where there are big waves.
- I’m not utterly helpless because I’m blind if I lose my glasses. If you’re blind without your glasses, and your glasses aren’t where you expect, you can’t really use your eyesight to find them.
- I don’t have to deal with all the problems of using and potentially losing contacts.
- …
For me, before I got laser surgery, I was once swimming in the ocean at a very big and popular beach. I was wearing contacts because obviously wearing glasses in the water is next to impossible. I got hit by a big wave, tossed around, and lost my contacts. Now I was almost completely blind, in a foreign country where I knew almost nobody, and trying to find my beach towel and bag among thousands of others. I actually can’t remember how I resolved that problem, but I do remember the massive stress and panic being blind like that caused. When I got back from the trip, I got my eyes fixed within a year.
but you didn’t have any massive stress or panic thinking about the worms that burrow into your eyes after wearing contacts in the ocean?
No, I was on vacation on Earth, not Proxima Centari 6.
Not necessarily useful to you any longer, but you can utilize a pinhole lens for situations like that. You can even use your hands/fingers to make the lens. You’ll look fucking ridiculous, but I doubt it’s bother you too much when it’s that or being blind.
To expand on that, you make a very small hole by curling your index finger, and look through that hole.
Just tried this and am now reading comments below to learn what the actual fuck. That works. This random internet advice isn’t a lie.
just tried it and it work?? how
When your eyes are open and unobscured, light is coming in from every direction. The lens is shaped in such a way that light rays parallel to the eye’s axis are focused on the macula, the center of your sharp vision. A near-sighted (myopic) eye focuses those parallel rays in front of the retina, and a far-sighted (hypermetropic) eye focuses them behind. The farther away the ray is from the eye’s axis, the more it is refracted by the lens, and the more obvious its out-of-focus-ness becomes if the lens has an incorrect shape.
Corrective eyewear works by refracting the light before it enters the eye and essentially cancelling out the lens’ imperfections.
A pinhole works by obscuring light rays that are farther from the axis and contribute to the blurry image, only letting through light rays that are near the axis, already aligned more or less with the macula, don’t have to be refracted as sharply, and don’t contribute as much to the blurry image. This is why the camera obscura works, and why apertures in modern photography are used to control both the image’s exposure and the strength of the depth of field.
Afaik if you’re myopic, your eyeballs are too long so the plane of focus created by looking at a far away object is no longer on your retina. So i think by looking through a pinhole you widen the depth of field. This means even stuff you don’t focus on is seen sharper.
I wonder if this also works for hyperopia…
huh! our bodies are so weird
Yeah, but not only our eyes/bodies are weird. If you want to know more about weird eyes look up goat pupils (they have horizontal pupils the can rotate 50% to be always level with the ground) or nautilus pinhole eyes (early stage of our eyes with no lense).
I use it to read with hyperopia
Big spectacles hate this trick!
Is this why I can see so much better in VR? Smaller field of view? I always assumed it as kind of a side effect of the depth of field hacks they do but FOV would make sense.
I learned this in school. It’s because it focuses the light through a narrow passage which increases the details. It’s also how cameras originally worked.
Optics.
That has limits. Not sure what it comes down to exactly, but under the most ideal conditions I have pulled off yet, I’d estimate it improves sight by 3-4.
-8 with the fov of a pinhole is still blind.
Now all I wonder is how the hell you solved that issue.
So do I.
So, what I think happened was that I knew roughly where my stuff was. When I went to play in the waves I basically went straight out from my towel. Because of the rip currents I was being pushed sideways while in the waves, but I mostly kept trying to correct for that so that I didn’t wander too far from my stuff. I am pretty sure about that, because that’s what I always do at the beach. I always hate being pushed around by rip currents and am really worried about getting caught in the undertow so I try to stick to the same part of the beach.
When I got tossed by the huge wave(s) I did end up getting moved sideways. I remember that because I remember how out of control I was. But, I suspect it wasn’t too far. So, when I went to search for my stuff I wasn’t searching the entire beach, just a small section of it.
I think I remembered what colours my beach towel was, so I think I just wandered that section of beach, squinting so I could see a bit better, looking for a towel with roughly the right colours and with nobody on it. Then when I thought I had the right one I crouched down to see if I could recognize the bag I brought.
I don’t think I asked for help, which would have been the smart option. But, I was a shy kid in a foreign country so I am pretty sure I didn’t do that.
But really, I don’t remember. I just have a clear memory of how helpless I felt, and a vague memory of wandering up and down the beach. The rest is just reconstructing how I think it probably happened based on vague memories and what I know about myself.
Before my wife got the surgery, she used her phones camera to look around. She used to jokingly say that she is a cyborg.
Regarding the topic. For her the procedure was also a game changer.
The worst one is when you wake up having drunk a little bit too much and you can’t find your glasses. You are now effectively blind and helpless and hungover.
If I was at home, I always knew where I had some backup glasses. But yeah, wake up at a friend’s house or something and you’re screwed.
I once had a friend forget to take out his contacts when drunk. He woke up bleeding from his eyes and struggling to get the things out in severe pain…
maybe not in the case of swimming but when you have your phone around you can always turn on your camera and then look at what it’s showing you
If you can find it
Depends on what issue you have, I get intense headaches/nausea/dizziness from looking at digital screens without my glasses for more than 20 seconds or so. The longer I look at them the worse it gets and longer it lasts. So it’s not really viable.
yeah same, but if all you use it for is to scan the room to find your glasses then it works quite well!
i have prescription swimming goggles
Yep, a good idea, but if you use them when playing in the ocean and are hit by a big wave, they can be knocked off.
fair enough, when I think about it theyre probably not better than the contacts in that sense
That’s actually awesome, I didn’t know those existed.
The answer to almost all of those is contacts.
One of the best decisions I every made, going from essentially blond without glasses to not needing them. Especially as someone who enjoys a lot of outdoor activities, not being made helpless by a lost or broken pair of glasses is a huge weight off my mind
essentially blond
Lasik changed your hair?
Right? This is an absolutely awesome autocorrect fail.
is that like chemo curls
Honestly that meteorologist that sadly took her own life several years back after having really bad complications from laser eye surgery was more than enough to convince me to not get it done.
Source on that?
Not the first and won’t be the last.
