My LASIK story
I'm doing this so I can enter a contest to win $5,000. Yes, that's how desperately I need the money. Anyway, I did have a pretty interesting LASIK story, so I thought it could be worth sharing.
I had bad eyesight for as long as I can remember, I probably started using glasses since I was around 5 years old, which you can imagine is a guarantee that you won't be considered cool at school, ever again. It's also a guarantee that you'll never be good at sports, and especially not good at anything having to do with swimming, since who wants to play "Marco Polo" with a person who is blind even without covering their eyes up. But that was me. Of course with time my prescription got worse and worse and by the time I was about 10 I was already like -6.5 in one eye and -5.5 in the other eye. Pretty close to legally blind and legally as uncool as they came. It didn't help matters that I was always at the top of the class in all my academics and weighed like 60 lbs. wet which meant I was the furthest away from athletic that anyone can imagine.
At 10 years old my sister (who was 13 at the time), got her first pair of contact lenses. I remember being sooo jealous of her. Even though she was a little bit of a coward and couldn't really put on the contacts herself so we basically had to strap her down to the bed with both hands tied up so that my mom could put a contact in one eye and I on the other. A few weeks (or years who knows) later something got into her eye and scratched her cornea so she couldn't wear contacts again for a while. But I was so desperate to wear them, so I convinced my mom to get a 10 year old contacts. I have to say, I was so happy about the change they made to my life, that I was really good about taking care of them and taking care of my eyes.
I kept wearing contacts well into my teen years, high school and college. However, especially in college I got a little bit more lax about my routine. I just didn't think it was fair (no I was just plain lazy) that I had to go through so much effort and so much time to take care of them. And for everyone who's experienced LASIK or even contacts, you know it's the greatest feeling on Earth to actually wake up in the middle of the night and look at your alarm clock and actually be able to read the time without fumbling about in the dark trying to find your glasses. Everybody talks about this fact so it seems a bit cliched, but seriously, it's the best feeling ever. So as a result, I started leaving my contacts in all the time without taking them off at night to wash them or anything. Anyone will tell you that's asking for trouble (eye infections, etc.) but for some reason I got really lucky and didn't get pink eye or anything like that while I had the contacts in.
At 22, I started my professional life. I went to work back in Puerto Rico for a Fortune 500 company back in 1997 (the fact that I've been doing this for 10 years is a whole other story). Back then, people from my office went to Venezuela quite frequently, and a lot of them came back with LASIK surgery done. They talked about how much their life changed and how cheap it was to get it done in Venezuela, especially if you joined the trip with a business trip you already had set up. So in 1998, I got the courage to do it. My doctor in Puerto Rico (Silvino Diaz Mendoza) had been one of the first ones to perform the procedure in Puerto Rico and had been trying and trying to convince me to do it, all for the low low price of $4,000, which you can imagine being a 23 year old just starting her professional life and what with the rent, and car payments, and wining and dining every night, I totally didn't have the money for. He said if I got 10 of my work colleagues he would give me a special discount, down to $3,500 or something like that. No way could I even get that much money together.
So I had a personal trip already planned for Venezuela in the Fall of '98 and I decided I'd take the leap, much to my doctor's chagrin. Funny enough, when I went to the doctors in Venezuela one day before the surgery he told me he had performed the procedure on my OWN doctor back in Puerto Rico. Ha! So if the doctor was good enough to do it on my own doctor, it was good enough for me. Especially since the price tag was a mere $800 compared to the prices I kept getting quoted in PR, even when you added the $300 plane ticket to Venezuela and possibly even a hotel for a couple of nights. These doctors in Venezuela said they'd been the first to perform the procedure, and that they'd already done it successfully on 25,000 patients, with a failure rate of 3. Not 3 percent, just 3 (total!).
My eyes had been so used to wearing contacts (especially since I'd taken to wearing them months at a time without bothering to take them off) that the doctors told me I had to take them off and wear only glasses for about 3 months because my corneas were totally misshapen and we had to give them enough time to go back to normal. You can imagine me at 23 with the "glass bottom" glasses from like the 1980's at my new fancy job. You can forget about going out at night, it would've been the end of my social life. But I had to suck it up for like 2 months and by the end of it thankfully my corneas were back to their natural state.
During the procedure all I can remember was "the pain" -- not so much pain but feeling powerless because you don't really know what's going on and you can't see. And also just hating for people in general to touch my eyes. You know when someone's doing your make up and they're doing either the mascara or the eyeliner and you can't HELP but want to close your eyes? That's what it was like. At some point I kept wanting to close my eyes so much which was making me really twitchy and nervous that the guys says if I don't stay still and not move my eyes that he won't do the procedure on the other eye. You mean motherf**er! I'm sitting here with things poking at my eyes and you want to play mind games with me?!!?
After the procedure all I remember was how it totally changed my life for the better, even though I was one of those people that was already used to the getting up in the night and being able to see the clock since I never took off my contacts. Unfortunately nature took its course and so here I am almost 10 years later and one of my eyes has started to go bad again. Granted, not nearly as bad as it used to be before, but it was still a bit of a disappointment. They have told me it doesn't mean that the first procedure wasn't successful, it's just that my eye sight was going to keep getting worse no matter what basically. They've also offered to put a contact lens just for the one eye, but I don't know. Even though I had a great experience with contacts and I was really lucky that nothing ever went bad even though I took terrible care of my eyes, I just don't want to have to deal with it all. So I guess if I want to back to being 20/20 I'll probably have to get the surgery again, for which I'll need to build up the courage (and the bank account since going to Venezuela is no longer an option!) to do it. I figure the 10 year mark probably sounds right...
I had bad eyesight for as long as I can remember, I probably started using glasses since I was around 5 years old, which you can imagine is a guarantee that you won't be considered cool at school, ever again. It's also a guarantee that you'll never be good at sports, and especially not good at anything having to do with swimming, since who wants to play "Marco Polo" with a person who is blind even without covering their eyes up. But that was me. Of course with time my prescription got worse and worse and by the time I was about 10 I was already like -6.5 in one eye and -5.5 in the other eye. Pretty close to legally blind and legally as uncool as they came. It didn't help matters that I was always at the top of the class in all my academics and weighed like 60 lbs. wet which meant I was the furthest away from athletic that anyone can imagine.
At 10 years old my sister (who was 13 at the time), got her first pair of contact lenses. I remember being sooo jealous of her. Even though she was a little bit of a coward and couldn't really put on the contacts herself so we basically had to strap her down to the bed with both hands tied up so that my mom could put a contact in one eye and I on the other. A few weeks (or years who knows) later something got into her eye and scratched her cornea so she couldn't wear contacts again for a while. But I was so desperate to wear them, so I convinced my mom to get a 10 year old contacts. I have to say, I was so happy about the change they made to my life, that I was really good about taking care of them and taking care of my eyes.
I kept wearing contacts well into my teen years, high school and college. However, especially in college I got a little bit more lax about my routine. I just didn't think it was fair (no I was just plain lazy) that I had to go through so much effort and so much time to take care of them. And for everyone who's experienced LASIK or even contacts, you know it's the greatest feeling on Earth to actually wake up in the middle of the night and look at your alarm clock and actually be able to read the time without fumbling about in the dark trying to find your glasses. Everybody talks about this fact so it seems a bit cliched, but seriously, it's the best feeling ever. So as a result, I started leaving my contacts in all the time without taking them off at night to wash them or anything. Anyone will tell you that's asking for trouble (eye infections, etc.) but for some reason I got really lucky and didn't get pink eye or anything like that while I had the contacts in.
At 22, I started my professional life. I went to work back in Puerto Rico for a Fortune 500 company back in 1997 (the fact that I've been doing this for 10 years is a whole other story). Back then, people from my office went to Venezuela quite frequently, and a lot of them came back with LASIK surgery done. They talked about how much their life changed and how cheap it was to get it done in Venezuela, especially if you joined the trip with a business trip you already had set up. So in 1998, I got the courage to do it. My doctor in Puerto Rico (Silvino Diaz Mendoza) had been one of the first ones to perform the procedure in Puerto Rico and had been trying and trying to convince me to do it, all for the low low price of $4,000, which you can imagine being a 23 year old just starting her professional life and what with the rent, and car payments, and wining and dining every night, I totally didn't have the money for. He said if I got 10 of my work colleagues he would give me a special discount, down to $3,500 or something like that. No way could I even get that much money together.
So I had a personal trip already planned for Venezuela in the Fall of '98 and I decided I'd take the leap, much to my doctor's chagrin. Funny enough, when I went to the doctors in Venezuela one day before the surgery he told me he had performed the procedure on my OWN doctor back in Puerto Rico. Ha! So if the doctor was good enough to do it on my own doctor, it was good enough for me. Especially since the price tag was a mere $800 compared to the prices I kept getting quoted in PR, even when you added the $300 plane ticket to Venezuela and possibly even a hotel for a couple of nights. These doctors in Venezuela said they'd been the first to perform the procedure, and that they'd already done it successfully on 25,000 patients, with a failure rate of 3. Not 3 percent, just 3 (total!).
My eyes had been so used to wearing contacts (especially since I'd taken to wearing them months at a time without bothering to take them off) that the doctors told me I had to take them off and wear only glasses for about 3 months because my corneas were totally misshapen and we had to give them enough time to go back to normal. You can imagine me at 23 with the "glass bottom" glasses from like the 1980's at my new fancy job. You can forget about going out at night, it would've been the end of my social life. But I had to suck it up for like 2 months and by the end of it thankfully my corneas were back to their natural state.
During the procedure all I can remember was "the pain" -- not so much pain but feeling powerless because you don't really know what's going on and you can't see. And also just hating for people in general to touch my eyes. You know when someone's doing your make up and they're doing either the mascara or the eyeliner and you can't HELP but want to close your eyes? That's what it was like. At some point I kept wanting to close my eyes so much which was making me really twitchy and nervous that the guys says if I don't stay still and not move my eyes that he won't do the procedure on the other eye. You mean motherf**er! I'm sitting here with things poking at my eyes and you want to play mind games with me?!!?
After the procedure all I remember was how it totally changed my life for the better, even though I was one of those people that was already used to the getting up in the night and being able to see the clock since I never took off my contacts. Unfortunately nature took its course and so here I am almost 10 years later and one of my eyes has started to go bad again. Granted, not nearly as bad as it used to be before, but it was still a bit of a disappointment. They have told me it doesn't mean that the first procedure wasn't successful, it's just that my eye sight was going to keep getting worse no matter what basically. They've also offered to put a contact lens just for the one eye, but I don't know. Even though I had a great experience with contacts and I was really lucky that nothing ever went bad even though I took terrible care of my eyes, I just don't want to have to deal with it all. So I guess if I want to back to being 20/20 I'll probably have to get the surgery again, for which I'll need to build up the courage (and the bank account since going to Venezuela is no longer an option!) to do it. I figure the 10 year mark probably sounds right...
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