Ask HN: Have you had laser eye surgery? What was your experience?
I am a long term HN member writing under an anonymous account as this is a somewhat personal issue for me.
I have been short-sighted (myopia of about -5.00 in both eyes) all my life, and generally wear both contact lenses and glasses. I find contact lenses really irritate my eyes when programming (dry eyes due to less blinking when on computer) and am fed up of issues with glasses (steaming, cleaning, etc) and recently have been considering laser eye surgery.
I live in the UK, and have booked consultations at the 3 main providers here - UltraLase, Optimax, Optical Express. I'll write my assessment of them each later once I go for my consultation with the last provider at the end of the month, but so far have concluded that one has to really research the area to avoid much of the nonsense that they tell patients especially with regard to equipment and surgeons used and why e.g. Ultralase charge £4700 for lasik+intralse+wavefront and say they use new Bausch & Lomb lasers that has higher resolution (dpi) and better surgeons (but ironically most of them are ex-Optimax surgeons) but Optimax charge £2395 for a similar lasik+intralase+wavefront procedure but say they use Nidek lasers as gives better results (even though it is older generation device) and they are cheaper as they already bought their machines and premises and have less ongoing overheads.
Anyway, I was wondering if any other HN members have had laser eye surgey (or thought about it and why you did not do it), what prodcedure you took (e.g. Lasek, Lasik, with Wavefront and/or Intralase), what your experience was like, what equipment was used (e.g. Visx, Nidek, Alegretto), and whether you researched this and what your thoughts are about various equipment-factors in the final result, and most importantly your surgeon and final result.
Thank you!