rfbooth.com :: thoughts :: lasik :: outcomes and facts

With the video over, we have one quick glance at an eye chart; I feel like my right eye is now better than it had ever been, even with the hard contact lenses I wore briefly in my teens before I realised I wasn't then responsible enough to keep them clean, and my left eye is almost as good. Astonishingly, I can now easily read the line below normal perfect; I get all of the 6/5 line right. I've gone from sufficiently short-sighted to get free eye tests and government help on buying glasses to better than perfect unaided vision, and it seems still to be getting better. There's an almost hallucinatory clarity to everything, perhaps because the Wavefront has smoothed away the imperfections. I am even allowed to start lifting again, with a sweatband for the moment, and in a week I can get in a shower without elaborate precautions, sleep without the guards, and even rub them if I want to. There has been absolutely no pain, and hardly even any inconvenience. It is a miracle on a scale that you simply can't understand unless you have had almost no uncorrected sight and have then had this surgery; I thought I could imagine how it would feel, and I was simply wrong. Notice I do not say like a miracle.

The most popular question I haven't yet answered is that of cost. Yes, you can find adverts offering procedures in the back of your newspaper for as little as £400 per eye, but frankly discount eye surgery is not a concept that appeals to me. I heartily, and without recompense, recommend doing what I did: just go to Ultralase. How much it will cost you depends on what treatment you end up going with, and the one I had was the priciest of the bunch, but Wavefront is worth it. The change I got from three grand wouldn't quite buy my designated driver for the day of the surgery a good lunch; over three years interest free, it works out at just a little over £80 a month. One can do elaborate calculations to work out how long it will be before not having to buy glasses and contacts breaks me even, but I don't care. If they doubled the price up front and charged me the same fee I'd've paid each month for contacts for the rest of my life, it would still be cheap. If you are considering it, go to see them. If they tell you you're suitable, do it. Do not pass go, do not collect three thousand pounds; do not, in short, fuck about. My friends told me, and I am telling you: it is simply the best choice you will ever make.