Two years after LASIK eye surgery
How do I feel now?
The surgery was problem-free and I haven't needed any glasses since. Being glasses-free now feels completely natural.
It is extremely convenient that I no longer have to shop for contact lenses and glasses. The surgery wasn't cheap either, the cost is similar to buying new glasses and contact lenses every now and then, but the freedom to not have to think about it feels great. Instead of paying for my vision in tiny installments I've now prepaid it for some time to come.
My self-identity has now adjusted enough that seeing myself in the mirror without glasses doesn't feel like something is missing. I no longer try to find my glasses in the morning. Actually I'm only reminded that I once had them when I see older photos of myself.
My hobby is swimming. The sense of freedom doing this without having to worry about losing my glasses is wonderful. When I'm out there, I can still float and look around at the completely sharp clouds and ocean, something I wouldn't have been able to do before.
Halo effect is still there
Now for the only downside.
If you have to stare at a lot of bright point lights at night, then LASIK may not be suitable for you, as still now years later my night vision is not as good as it was before.
Don't get me wrong I see really well at night, but there is some haloing around light sources that wasn't there before.
When I mentioned this previously, even people with naturally perfect eyesight since childhood also reported seeing these haloes, so maybe having them is actually a benefit of using glasses and not actually a downside of the surgery.
The haloing does not effect my ability to look at computer screens at night. I'm not sure what kind of professions there might be where lessened ability to see bright lights clearly at night might be a hindrance, but there are bound to be some.
Conclusion
Getting LASIK is one of the best decisions I've made, but I can say that easily only because there were no issues with my particular surgery. Now that the risk is in the past, it feels easy to discount. Still, having someone fiddle with your eyes with knives and lasers is a pretty hard core way to spend your evening and unlikely to be completely risk-free.
One thing it was though was completely painless. Not bullshitting you here or trying to appear brave. Honestly, completely painless.
If this blog post gets read by enough people who decide to go and get LASIK done, I'm sure there might be one of you out there who happens to have a really bad experience. Many more will have somewhat less-than-perfect experiences, such as requiring further operations to fully adjust their vision. While I would recommend LASIK even to my closest friends, with those unlucky readers in mind I feel the need to caution that your safety is not guaranteed.
Thanks for reading
If you would like to read all the gory details about the surgery, read my previous post about the LASIK experience. I've also uploaded a video of my whole surgery. The reason I posted about this again now is that previously not much time had passed yet between the surgery and the blog post. This blog has no comments section, but I read every comment posted to the Hacker News thread.
Plug time. Since 2011 I've been running a Japanese candy subscription club called Candy Japan. Since many people have asked me questions about how to start a club like that, I recently started writing an ebook on subscription boxes to share everything I've learned so far. If you would like to motivate me to continue writing it, you can sign up to get notified when the book is out on the leanpub page.
