IOL

d a n i e l m c k i n n o n . c o m

Tuesday April 25, 2006

Well I'm back in glasses again.

3 months since my surgery, things have really stabilized, and with that stabilization comes an understanding of the pros and cons related to getting closer to a "final state" of how my eyes will be post-IOL surgery.

Since I last wrote 2 months ago, progress has been really slow. A good analogy would be how concrete takes it's final form. When you first pour it, you get an idea of what things will look like over time, but you have to wait some time for things to settle and dry before you can know how everything will eventually turn out. My eyes have been like concrete ever since I had the surgery done. The first couple of weeks things were changing rapidly, now things have slowed down. Ever since my 1 month update, the biggest issue has been the imbalance of prescriptions which are now present in each eye. At one point things were really tough for me and I was having a lot of trouble adapting, then things got better, and now it's bothering me again. The last few weeks I had been complaining of a general "haziness" in my vision, and even from day 1 I was warned that because determining IOL prescriptions and their inability to fix people with an astigmatism (like me), expecting perfect vision and no glasses ever again (especially for someone with a high level of myopia like I had) was an unrealistic expectation. I was told this, and yet I still had the hope that I would be glasses-free forever.

At least I am that much closer to that goal.

At this point in time, I would say that I have reached 85-90% on my scale of 100% perfect vision, and I don't think it's going to differ much from this percentage even 3 months from now. As it stands, I have a couple of issues:

Halos/starbursts at night (minor)
Imbalanced prescription (far-sighted in left eye, near-sighted in the right) is taxing on the brain and makes things hard to compensate for (major)
Astigmatism not corrected leads to general fuzziness for everything that I see -- the more crispness that is required (like for reading signs or text) the harder things are for me (major)

After reading up online, talking to my follow-up surgeon in Boston, and experiencing my new eyes for nearly 100 days now, I think one more surgery is going to be required if I ever want to achieve great vision without glasses full-time, and that would be a very minor laser surgery called PRK. In no way at all do I regret my decision (My follow-up a few weeks ago went great and my cell count #s are fantastic), but I would be lying if I didn't say I was a little disappointed. My disappointment doesn't come from the skills of my surgeon or having to have a follow-up surgery (the only medical thing that frightens me really is the dentist) but it's the money involved. If I had the financial ability I would schedule a PRK enhancement today (I am guessing that in the Boston area this would probably cost another $3-4,000) but alas I now have to decide whether I am going to wear the new glasses I just got full-time or just continue to deal with the "off" prescription that I am currently living with. I guess I was just a fool to not really 100% listen to what I read before, but actually I think that now the power problem of my prescription has been fixed, now I am just focusing on the minor issue that has still been left unresolved.

I still have probably 3 more months until my prescription 100% settles in, but I doubt it's going to change much from where it is today. I would consider my current state to be a minor bump in the road, but honestly if there is a solution to what I am experiencing now, I'll probably look sooner rather than later to getting this fixed so I can truly be glasses-free as it relates to normal distance vision (I don't care about wearing glasses for reading only).

Dan