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Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

> [re: PRK] This regrowth can be ... rather painful

I'm here to tell everyone to listen to the doctor about pain medications and sleeping after PRK. I have a repeatedly-demonstrated very high tolerance for pain, and didn't bother to follow the directions.

As a result, I spent about an hour seriously considering whether it would hurt less if I physically scooped out my eyeballs by hand. That's not a metaphor -- I had to mentally restrain my hands.

And the punchline is that 12 years later I again need glasses for computer work, which is what I do all day.

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I had PRK a few months ago and left mindblown; completely painless and insanely quick.

First 30 hours after the surgery weren't the most pleasant but to me it wasn't painful—at least not as painful as a migraine.

I thought I generally had dry eyes but after the surgery I didn't notice any dryness at all.

My right eye is not fully healed yet so I don't see perfectly. But still very happy and overall a good QOL improvement.

What if your eye never returns to normal? How did you think about the risk reward of a cosmetic procedure that can make you blind?

The Doctor clearly saw that my eye hadn't fully healed and therefore diagnosed that it was the reason I wasn't seeing perfectly. Don't get me wrong, it is still far better than when I didn't wear my glasses. So even if it doesn't go back to normal it would still be an improvement.

As I understood it, the procedure in itself won't make you blind—ever. If you get complications—like an infection—then that's another story. I didn't have any.

So I didn't think about the risk-reward as everyone around me just had eye dryness or halos at night. Both of which are very easy to live with.

Thanks for sharing. I don't know anyone that did it first hand and online its hard to trust most websites because there's a whole industry behind it.

If you have other questions, I would be happy to answer them. But I'm just one of many thousands person.

I think all Doctors would tell you that you should do the surgery because they have a financial incentive to tell you so. However, I don't live in the USA and a lot of things I read didn't apply to where I went. For example, they prescribe bandage lens for at least 7 days in the USA but I only wore mine for 40 hours. Then a bunch of eye drops and all was fine.

LASIK etc. are not "cosmetic". Being able to see properly without glasses is a substantial thing for some people, from sports participation to not worrying about fogging to not groping around to find your glasses in the middle of the night.

Cosmetic?

They probably meant elective. It's sort of cosmetic in the sense of preferring your look without glasses I suppose, but you wouldn't call gait-fixing surgery cosmetic.

Same here. Three days of absolute hell. Even a single blue led was too much to bear. And like you I now need reading glasses, but I don't really care: I can see well enough in the distance, I'm not visually crippled throughout the day without my glasses.

I used to have dry eyes afterwards for quite some time (years) as well, but that seems to have gone away at some point.

From my experience it was hell of a whole week, specially the first 5 days. And every kind of light was aggressive for me. My eyesight took ~3 weeks to be able to read properly on screen without zooming 400%. I didn't freak out because my doctor told me that the healing process really depended on everyone's body. 2 years later I have absolutely not regrets from doing that surgery despite probably still always reminding myself as one of the worst week of my life during recovery.

I had a completely different experience.

First 30 or so hours were pretty inconvenient: dry eyes, bandage lens that would cause itching and general photophobia. The Doctor removed my bandage lens after less than 48 hours and the same day I resumed my normal life. I was still sensitive to light but I could read screens without issues at all.

Something I wonder is whether bring very overweight can cause changes in eyesight, and whether weight loss might restore it.

Being very overweight usually causes high blood sugar, which itself causes changes in eye shape, as well as damage to the retina.

The eye shape changes are reversible, but not the retina damage.

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