Today marks the fifth anniversary of having the outer layers of my eyes melted away, then zapped by lasers, only to heal again over the next three months into near perfect vision. Five years ago, I had PRK surgery and blogged about my experience. It’s funny how you forget about all the little things you had to worry about before the surgery. The daily rituals of inserting and removing and cleaning contacts, the additional pain and effort involved when having a foreign object in your eye next to your contact, the way you couldn’t read the alarm clock at night without squinting or moving extra close, the way you were screwed if you lost a contact while skiing or after getting punched in the face at the boxing gym; I haven’t had to think about those things in years.

I had my three month post-PRK followup the other day. At this point, I was able to read the 20⁄15 lines with each eye individually. Sweet! However, the right eye is still slightly behind, but it seems to be catching up. When I cover the left eye, I can tell the right eye is slightly out of focus and slightly ghosted. I attribute this to the right eye being drier on average, and the doctor agreed.

Eight weeks have passed since having my eyes peeled and zapped. I would say that the left eye is pretty damn close to the acuity I had with glasses/contacts. All ghosting and double vision has retreated from the left. It has slowly improved since three weeks ago from pretty good, to pretty damn good. The right eye still exhibits a minor amount of ghosting and not being able to quite focus past that blurriness.

Four weeks have passed since having my eyes dissolved and zapped. There was significant improvement over that first week following the surgery, but the past three weeks have shown improvements so slight that it is next to impossible to know whether my vision is better one day or the next. The cumulative affect is greater and I do say that my eyesight has definitely increased in the three past weeks, but nowhere near the acuity I had with glasses or contacts… yet.

It is now 14 days after my PRK vision correction surgery. Improvement during this past week has been much slower than the first week. There is still a significant amount of ghosting, making reading a chore and driving somewhat questionable. I am very liberal with the preservative-free rewetting eye drops, since I’ve found that dry eyes will only perpetuate this ghosting effect. I’ve been able to work full days in the office yesterday and today, though I’m a continued object of mockery by my coworkers when they see the huge fonts on my screen.

It’s now been ten days since the surgery. I’ve gone into the office the last two days as well as today, but have been unable to work full days. The fact that 99% of my job includes reading and writing on a computer screen has really sunk in. I can handle enough for a while, but my eyes get too fatigued and the doublevision/ghosting seems to increase over time. Still, I’m not disappointed at all, as I continue to see improvements every day.

It’s been a week! This is a major accomplishment in the life of my new eyes. Today I got the bandage contacts out and was told my eyes were healing perfectly. Still, that doesn’t mean my vision has stabilized yet, in fact it is anything but perfect. My vision actually worsened a little after the bandage contacts were out, and my eyes have felt rather dry and scratchy all day. I’ve heard that other people have had this experience of worsening vision without the contacts, so it seems to be a natural occurrence.

It is nearing the end of the fifth day after my PRK laser correction surgery. Every day is a slight improvement over the previous. I am now able to read smaller print, although it is all still blurry and smudged. I’ve been able to reduce the font size on the monitor to normal, although I still have the monitor size itself blown up to 800x600. The blurriness I’m experiencing now isn’t exactly like it was when I didn’t have my glasses on.

It is now the beginning of day four after the PRK surgery. Both eyes are now worse than the night before in vision acuteness. Everything is blurry again, up close and far away. The left seems a little clearer but not by much. There isn’t really much pain besides the annoying feeling that there’s something in the eye at different times.

I’ve reached the end of the third day after my PRK surgery and am feeling hopeful about things to come. They warned me that days 2 and 3 would be the worst. Day 2 was horrid, but today started better and things noticeably improved throughout the day. Instead of the constant burning of day 2, today’s annoyance was intermittent periods of feeling like I had something in my eye. I kept asking my girlfriend to look for something, but she couldn’t see anything and my eyes weren’t red or bothered.