Eye Fry, Part One (Decision)
I had laser eye surgery about six months ago. Here's my story.
I've been very nearsighted most of my life, starting to wear glasses in 4th grade and switching to soft contact lenses in eighth grade. My last contact lens prescription in 1993 showed a bit of astigmatism, as well as severe myopia -- around 7.5 diopters. My eyes stayed pretty much unchanged since 1993, though I think they got a bit worse in the last few years as a string of busy software engineering jobs took its toll on my vision. Rather than get a new contact lens prescription, though, I just switched back to eyeglasses, which were comfortable and convenient.
But the arrival of my kids changed things. Jumping on Daddy often includes the bonus of getting to grab his glasses and fling them behind the couch. Waking up in the middle of the night to round up my wandering daughter was annoying if I didn't find my glasses on the nightstand on the first or second or third try. And as we discovered the neighborhood swimming pool, I found myself taking too many timeouts to wipe water drops off my lenses.
After researching all the jokes on The Simpsons about sudden blindness following laser surgery, I tentatively decided to do it. Then one day in the fall of 2005, my work's HR department announced that open enrollment for the coming year was starting soon, which I realized meant that if I wanted to participate in the flex spending plan (meaning I got to pay for the surgery with pretax dollars) for 2006, I essentially had to schedule surgery right away for the coming year, and to take maximum advantage of some quirks in the flex plan, I wanted the surgery to be as early as possible in 2006.
I made an appointment with Dr. Scott Hyver, who was recommended by several colleagues at work. I expected his price to be non-competitive, given that (a) he advertises a lot on the radio, and (b) he doesn't advertise his price, but I wanted someone with good cash flow in case he and I ended up in a plaintiff-defendant relationship.
The consultation was about half an hour, mostly consisting of an assistant to Dr. Hyver shining lights into my eyes and poking them here and there. At the end, Dr. Hyver came in the room and said that I was a good candidate for surgery, in particular because my corneas were pretty thick.
Dr. Hyver recommended wavefront lasik, which involves the creation of a map of your eye and a corresponding plan for correction specific to both high-order and low-order defects. There were several reasons for this recommendation: (1) it gives generally better results because it's more accurate, (2) it was the only realistic option for someone with big (high-diameter) corneas like mine, and (3) it would reduce nighttime halos by correcting as much of the corneal surface as possible. I'm sure it also helped that it was the most expensive laser surgery he offered, but oh well.
I'm naturally suspicious when someone offers an opinion but stands to benefit from having a specific opinion, so I attempted to get him to rate my suitability on a scale from 0 to 10. He answered that this is elective surgery, so there isn't any sort of tradeoff that makes even marginally suitable candidates worth pursuing -- either you're 100% suitable, or don't risk it. He did say that a better candidate wouldn't have such bad vision in the first place, but I was still well within the range of suitability. I liked his answer and made an appointment for Friday, January 6, 2006.
More to come.
