Eye appointment on Wednesday went okay. I can wear my contacts again, but only for limited times. I go back to see the doctor again in three months to check performance of my eyes. In the mean time, I have to put eye drops in my eye every two hours when wearing contact lenses, every four hours when I'm not, and LacriLube at night. Joy.

While talking with the doc, I found out that lasik is definitely not an option for me. She also mentioned Conductive Keratoplasty (CK) surgery, or possibly Verisyse implantable contact lenses. Neither of these is covered through my docotor, so I'd have to bear the whole cost of the operaton. Not thinking anything more about this until after the new year.

Had my interview yesterday. I think generally it went well. There are a few questions that I might have answered differently in retrospect, but hey, that's life. I won't konw for at least two weeks, probably more.

There's a woot-off going on right now too!

If you haven't gotten a RSS/Atom/feed reader yet, and don't use LJ for this, you might want to check out Google Reader. I personally found the interface very comfortable. But I've gotten very used to reading everything here on LJ, so going to yet another web site to get this info isn't likely to happen for me. But if you people out there, I'd recommend it.

Is there anyone around here who has either had or strongly considered corrective vision work performed? I'm talking RK, Lasik, implantable contact lenses, etc. If so, please comment here, for I have questions. I'm concerned about what questions to ask, what things to be concerned with, how do I choose a good doctor, what process is best, how painful the process is, and many other items.

A little background - About 1980, I was told I needed glasses and was promptly given a pair. My eyesight got progressively worse, in a very quick timeframe. In the summer of 1986, my vision was so bad that I was designated as medically necessary for contact lenses, and started wearing them. Now, almost 20 years later, I'm tired of this.

Every morning, I wake up to a blur of a room until I force two large pieces of plastic in front of my eyes. Every morning, I step into a shower where I know instinctively where the soap and shampoo are, because I can't see them. I shove two pieces of plastic directly onto my eyeballs in order to function during the day. And while my eyesight has worsened to -11.75 diopters in each eye, and has been stable for the last five years or so. I figure that my eyes can now handle this.

What I don't know is if Lasik is even an option. My eyesight is horrible, with a capitial horrible. I think I've heard that Lasik only corrects up to -9 diopters, which I'm well over. I believe that's where intraocular lenses, or implantable contact lenses come into play. While this technology has been around for a while for things like cataracts, it was just recently approved by the FDA for vision correction, and long term studies have not been performed. A risk, yes.

While I know that I will need to talk to many professionals about this subject, including my own optometrist, opthamologist, and the people who may perform the procedure, I'd like to be able to ask intelligent questions of these people versus "Uh, so what do you do exactly?" This is, after all, the future of my eyesight that I am discussing, and would like to ensure that I get this right. So I'm fielding informal resources first, and thus this post.