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| How long ago did you have this surgery? |
| I was operated on 1512 days ago. |
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| How much does the surgery cost and does insurance cover the procedure? |
| As of January 2006, the procedure costs anywhere from $4,000-4,500 per eye. Since this is considered a "cosmetic" procedure, insurance does NOT cover anything. My surgery cost $100 for the evaluation, $7,500 for the surgery in Beverly Hills, $200 for the drops I had to take afterward, and $1,500 for the post-op care in Boston for a grand total of $9,300 for the medical costs alone. |
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| Can you feel the IOLs in your eyes? |
| No, I cannot feel the IOLs in my eyes. It's as if they were never there in the first place. |
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| Did they put you under for the surgery? |
| No, you have to be awake for the surgery. If you were put under you would not be able to look in certain directions that the surgeon needs you to at the proper moment. For this reason, you have to be awake during the entire procedure. Instead of putting you under, they use anaesthetic drops many times in the eyes. Drops might not seem like enough anesthesia, but there are very few nerve endings in the eyes so they work really well. |
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| How long has this surgery been performed? |
| Phakic IOLs were first implanted in the 1980s in Europe, but the procedure has changed much since that time. Better materials, more experienced surgeons, and better calculations (to determine what power of lens should be implanted) have made the procedure safer and better since those early days. Even though the treatment has been performed in Europe and Canada for quite some time, the surgery was only recently FDA approved in September 2004. |
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| Who performed your IOL surgery and how did you hear about this surgeon? |
| My IOL surgery was performed by Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler in Beverly Hills, California. When I decided that I was interested in having this surgery performed, I researched doctors in Boston, but was only able to find 2 doctors who had performed the procedure as of 2005. One doctor at Massachusetts Eye & Ear had done around 5 procedures, another in Brookline had done 2. No matter how brilliant the doctor, I didn't want someone cutting open my eye where I was still obviously a "guinea pig" in their training of how to perfect the procedure. I started to research other doctors online and found that the surgeons who were part of the FDA trials were the most experienced ones, and those were people located (for the most part) in California, New York, etc. While doing a search on the IOL surgery in general, I found an article online talking about cleanliness of the operating room, and making things sterile. The article featured Dr. Boxer Wachler and it was from that article that I ended up at his web site. After contacting other surgeons in California and Canada via e-mail and having received no responses, I got a return e-mail from Dr. Boxer Wachler's office within 10 minutes. This initial display of professionalism is what made me ignore all other doctors. When I found out that it would be CHEAPER to have the surgery done in Beverly Hills of all places (probably one of, if not the densest area of talented doctors in the world), the decision was made. |
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| Is IOL surgery the same as LASIK? |
| Absolutely not!! LASIK is a laser eye surgery (there have been many different types since lasers were first used to reshape the cornea), and the IOL procedure does not use a laser at all. For many people (including myself), laser refractive surgery simply isn't an option due to corneas not being thick enough, corneas being too flat (my problem), or a myriad of other issues that will be discovered when you have a LASIK evaluation (I advise you at LEAST get 2 evaluations, the more the better). The IOL surgery uses an old style scalpel (and steady hand) to insert the lenses inside your eyes. Laser surgery has its pros and cons: it's a quicker recovery and for many people the results are fantastic, but the surgery is irreversible and there hasn't been any true long term results to look back to yet. IOL implants have cons of their own, but it's a great option for the extremely myopic patient that cannot have LASIK performed. |
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| What was your prescription prior to surgery? |
| My prescription was OD -11.00 OS -10.75 when I was last measured in 2005. I need to add the SPH and AXIS values at a later date. |
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