This is something that I have been meaning to blog about for awhile. About a month ago, on March 20th, I had my eyes lasered at Hoopes Vision. I had heard that they are one of the more reputable and well-known laser eye surgery centers in the area and in the country, and since it was my eyes I was having done I wanted only the best to do them. I have been impressed and happy with the staff there every time I have been in. It took a couple of appointments before I actually had my surgery. I also went for about 4 weeks without wearing my contacts, that was not a fun time.

My surgery was the afternoon of March 20th, Jodi drove me to the surgery center since I wouldn’t be able to drive after I was done. The whole process took about 3 hours, but a lot of that was waiting around because they were kind of busy. There was this crazy lady going around trying to find the person she was there to pick up, she got annoying pretty quick. I opted for the Valium to help make sure I was calm during the procedure. They also put numerous drops in my eyes to help clean them out and numb them.

The video of my surgery is above, it doesn’t have any sound or anything so it is kind of difficult to know what is going on. It is only about half of the surgery, so only one of my eyes. The actual surgery only took about 10 minutes. I walked in and laid down on a bed with the laser up by my head. There were two nurses and the doctor, Dr. Hoopes, Jr. in the room that worked on my eyes. The video is taken from the top, the first eye that they did was my right eye. First they put some plastic sticky thing on my eye lids and then used some metal thing to hold them open. Then they used a couple tools to help remove the top few cells of my cornea to get to the meat of the cornea. Throughout this whole process they rinsed and dried my eye several times. None of this ever hurt, but I did feel a bit of pressure from the pushing. After they had this done they turned off the lights and set everything in the laser and lasered my eyes. The nurse on my right entered the numbers in the laser computer while the doctor verified they were accurate. The actual lasering lasted only seconds. There was a little green light on the laser machine that I had to focus on while the surgery was going on, the machine had sensors to know if my eye was moving around though so even if I moved my eye around it shouldn’t have caused a problem. I could smell a little bit of a burning smell while they were lasering my eye, that was kind of weird. After they had done all of this to my right eye they put a contact lens for protection in my eye and then they did the same thing to my left eye. The process was painless and actually rather easy. When I stood up after the surgery I could already see much better.

I hurt a fair amount for the next few days, from what they told me I had a worse reaction than most people do. Part of my problem too was that I had PRK instead of LASIK. PRK is a slightly different procedure, they don’t cut a flap in my cornea, instead they just take a little bit off and do the lasering at the top of the cornea. PRK is suppose to be a safer procedure and more accurate, the problem is that it takes longer to heal from it. Even now I am not seeing as well as I will in the next couple of months. They told me I would see good after a week, great after a month and my best after 2 or 3 months. I have noticed continued improvement since my surgery. Last week I was seeing a blurry 20/30, today when I went in for another follow-up appointment I am seeing a blurry 20/20, so it is getting better.

I am definitely glad that I had the procedure done, I kind of wish it was a little quicker to get through, but it will be worth it. I am so grateful to Jodi for all the she did for me while I was going through everything. She drove me around a lot to the vision center and bought me lots of eye drops. She was so patient too while I complained and couldn’t do very much for a couple of days after. She is a great wife!