Gizmodo reviews LASIK (Verdict: having your eyeball sucked out of your skull and sliced open with a laser hurts.)
Gizmodo's Brian Lam describes in grisly detail a sensation I have often imagined in lurid detail in the waiting room of my optometrist's office: what it is like to have your retina sliced open with a laser beam.
The nurse applied a series of numbing drops to my eyeball, each stronger than the previous. The doctor clamped my lids back with a metal tool. I felt a bracket hold my eye down and someone in the operating room gave the order, "Suction."A whirring sound commenced and my eyeball felt like it was being sucked up and out of my skull, elongated like a green grape between a Roman emperor's fingers, ready to burst. The bright blue-white light grew closer. As the pressure killed circulation in the eye things went black and I felt an arcing slice in the surface of my cornea—I did not move my jaw or tongue or mouth, but deep in my throat I uncontrollably whimpered...
Amazingly, Lam says that most LASIK customers, eager to save a few bucks, opt to have the surgery done with a scalpel instead. Meanwhile, it takes me a bottle of scotch every morning to work up the nerve to put my contacts in.
What LASIK really feels like [Gizmodo]
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this is horsesh*t. i had lasik done, it didn't hurt, worked perfectly, and had very few minor problems. the most annoying part was the smell. the best part was i went home, took a hour nap, woke up, and i could see, without glasses. and i had the procedure with the scalpel. don't believe the hype.
John, I tried daily wear contacts recently. They were great; comfortable, vision was good, very little dryness. Then I tried to remove them. One came out just fine, and the other (the toric one, since I have a mild astigmatism in one eye) was stuck like super glue to my eye. I spent five minutes pocking, prodding, rewetting, drenching with saline, etc before finally removing it. Three days in a row, this procedure was repeated to the point that I started to get a migraine on the third day. Well, I didn't hesitate to go back to regular contacts. Woof. Perhaps I should have tried a bottle of scotch to get the contact out.
Three members of my family had PRK surgery. Obviously PRK is a lot different from LASIK, and involves a lot more pain. But it was pretty scary to help them through the healing process and hear their descriptions of the pain. Ugh. I still consider it but my vision has changed a bit over the years, so I'm waiting for it to really stabilize.
I agree with Entropy. I had mine done five years ago, and didn't feel a thing. I'll admit, the "suction" step was psychologically a little difficult, but it didn't physically hurt at all. I went home, slept off the effects of the sedative they'd given me, went out to dinner, and could read the menu no problem. The next day I did a 500 mile drive, and the only hitch was having to stop every couple of hours to put in the post-op eye-drops. I encourage everyone to do it.
@1: Yes, because your individual experience is exactly the same as everyone elses. Also, that big key next to the 'Z' is the shift key. It makes the letters big.
The quoted part of the Gizmodo article is misleading. Reading the entire post, the problem appeared to be that they didn't leave enough time for the drops to complete numb his eyeball. The other eyeball was painless.
I think you meant cornea, not retina, when you said "what it is like to have your retina sliced open".
Regardless of the sensations, I'm really glad I have such great eyesight, especially considering all that time I spent as a kid sitting too close to the TV or playing video games for too long. Turns out it doesn't necessarily ruin your eyes.
I've thrown a three-hundred pound man through drywall for jokingly trying to touch my eye.
BAD TOUCH
I can never even have contacts much less surgery.
I had Lasik done in 2000. It took 22 minutes from the time I walked into the office to the time I walked out with 20/15 in both eyes. I didn't feel any pain, just a light pressure and tapping, and after the procedure I went to a movie, no problem at all. Yeah everybody's results and sensations may be different, but over the years, I have never encountered anybody that had a problem with it. That's not to say they are not out there, only that the percentage is extremely small.
Entropy: I'll believe the hype, but I'll also believe you shit bullets if that was your genuine response to a scalpel coming towards your eyeball.
I've worn glasses since I was five years-old, they've become such a part of my "look" that I couldn't see going without them.
@9 - I see what you did there
I had my eyes cut with the blade thing as well. My eye doctor preferred it to the laser as he said it makes a more perfect cut than the laser. He was the one driving, I was just along for the ride.
But ya, no pain. The valium was nice. More comfortable than any dentist appt.
I had LASIK, and something went wrong with the cutting of the flap on one eye, causing excruciating pain for a few weeks after the operation. I suspect that the flap got completely cut off, and that the doctor went ahead and treated my surgery as a normal flapless laser surgery. The doctor didn't say what happened, and he didn't give me a videotape of the surgery on that eye as he did for the other eye. But in the end I'm happy, with great vision.
I also know a person whose vision was ruined by uncorrectible vision problems after a botched LASIK surgery. He might have to give up practicing law because of the vision issues mean he sometimes can't read briefs.
There are real risks with LASIK, but they are rare enough that it's worth it for someone who can accept a gamble.
It's inappropriate to discount someone's experience with Lasik because your own was so different.
I work for a nonprofit Lasik patient advocacy. We don't provide Lasik, just Lasik information and we certify Lasik doctors' patient outcomes.
While the vast majority of Lasik patients experience virtually no pain, there are reasons that the surgery can be very uncomfortable. In the instance reported by Brian Lam, his eyes required more time for the topical anesthetic to take effect, thus he felt the suction used to hold the microkeratome to his cornea and to create the Lasik flap.
Although a surgical blade is used for Lasik, it is nothing like a scalpel. A microkeratome is a device that uses a flat plate more than the width of the cornea to apply pressure and flatten the cornea, then an ultra-sharp blade passes over the cornea to create a very thin flap of tissue.
By applying the laser energy under the Lasik flap, the eye is "fooled" into not realizing that it has had surgery. This mutes the healing response and is a primary reason why Lasik is often without pain and has a fast vision recovery.
Glenn Hagele
Council for Refractive Surgery Quality Assurance
http://www.USAEyes.org
Bad Lasik. My mom has made a fortune from bad procedures. Keep them coming, it's my future inheritance!
@ Brownlee:
I thought I was the only one who had that scotch problem! That's why I end up leaving the ol' contacts in for a couple months at a time. I'm sure that's not good for me though... To have to choose between liver damage or eye damage...
I still never quite understand the differences between LASIK and LASEK... but I do know that eye surgery is some of the safest and most sucessful...
Do not believe this article, he must have gone to a horse doctor south of the border. I had lasik done on both eyes and it didn't hurt at all and you hardly feel a thing. And with all the valium and other fun drugs they give you, you wouldn't care if it did. The lesson is: pay more than 50 pesos for eye surgery.
So you must be getting a kick out of these replies, then?
NOTHING in life is totally free of risk. Contact lens wearers have an increased risk of corneal ulcers and leaving them in for 2 months at a time increases the risk ten-fold.
That's nothing. My mum had macular pucker. Surgery took about an hour. The gel from inside your eyeball is removed. The surgeon then scrapes off the scar tissue on the retina and flattens your retina as best she could. Yes, the surgeon scrapes the INSIDE of your eyeball!
My mum says she could feel the scraping tool. This proves that you can sense touch on the inside of your eyeball. I can't think of why you would need to have the sense of touch on the inside surface of your eyeball though.
When I had LASIK, I was repeatedly assured that there would be no pain, merely "some discomfort".
I had a couple valium, and they put my head in a vise, mapped my eyeball with the scanning laser, and sliced a flap with the microkeratome.
It felt exactly like having a slice cut in my eyeball. I screamed and involuntarily thrashed a little, which is bad 'cause I'd already been mapped and the vise is not strong enough to truly immobilize a large freaked-out human.
The doctor yelled at me to keep still (a reasonable request) and I cursed vigorously at him and told him to get on with it. I didn't thrash during the second equally painful cut, because I was expecting it.
Afterwards the doctor told me that only a small percentage of humans have pain-sensing nervous tissue in the surface of their eyes. Apparently most people don't even really need the anesthetic drops, so the doctors get somewhat cavalier about making sure they've taken effect. He apologized for hurting me, I apologized for cursing him out, and I've had excellent vision for the last ten or twelve years now.
Soon I will need to go back to glasses for farsightedness due to my advanced age. But I won't need bifocals, and I no longer have any astigmatism, so I'm happy.
Being able to wear a full helm without putzing around with the visor to get my glasses in place is a wonderful thing.
Like #6, I have never been able to handle eyeball-touching. I can't stand to have anything near my eye. I can't bear to watch anyone touch his own eye. Just thinking of Andalusian Dog or Zombie makes my stomach roil. When I was a kid, I disappointed my great-uncle -- whose only desire for me was that I be pretty in contacts -- by agreeing to order contacts, and then sending them back because I couldn't put them in (and neither could anyone else!). I have pissed off SO many optometrists. Once, at an opthamologist's, after my eye had been numbed so the doctor could take my eyeball pressure, three female assistants tried to hold me down because, every time anything approached my eye, I'd spasm. This particular event is filed in the top five worst instants of my life, worsened by the fact that I began to cry from the sheer embarrassment of being held down. And now when I shop for glasses, I simply sign waivers saying I don't give two shits about the prescription, just so that nobody tries to touch my eye and make me cry.
Now, the irony: I've always dreamed of having LASIK. Consider that dream killed.
#22 If you really want to move towards LASIK or contacts or anything, you'll need to first get used to using eyedrops. If you make sure the bottle is warm and not cold, you may be able to get used to things coming close to your eye without freaking out(when it hits, you feel a slight warmth and maybe relief if your eyes are dry).
After getting used to that, you may be able to try contacts, as the feeling of putting them in is very similar. The idea is that the contact touches and gloms onto your eye, and it's not you pushing them on.
Even after all this, I still prefer glasses, personally. Contacts make me tired, and I start having trouble keeping my eyes focused around the end of the day.
A weird observation about touching your eye - when you touch it, you don't really feel like you're touching it. Instead, it feels like you're touching something that's still in front of your eye.