Experiences with Laser Eye Surgery?

GodLessOne asks: "I am about to get my hands on a reasonable lump of cash and I am working on my list of ways to make it an ex-lump of cash. All of the normal geek things appear on the list, but one item that I keep considering is corrective laser eye surgery. Would anyone care to share their real world experiences? I worry that the people selling it are the only ones saying how wonderful it is, and what percentage of people show a marked improvement afterward. Are there any stories out there relating how bad it can be if it goes wrong?"

And the short answer is...

[SIGALRM]

Would anyone care to share their real world experiences?

<squint>
I would, but I'm a hunt-and-peck typist, and my keyboard is pretty much just a blur.
</squint>

If I had money to spend...

[mikael]

... personally I'd just wear glasses, and spend the money on a new computer. For me, glasses help boost your intellectual look (Don't something like 70% of engineers wear glasses?).

Forget laser eye surgery

[Anonymous Coward]

Get laser ear surgery, then you can echolocate your way around even in the dark.

Jessica Simpson had it done

[Anonymous Coward]

She's pretty smart. I'd follow her lead.

A horrible disappointment

[bravehamster]

I hate to break it to ya buddy, but I was crushed when I found out, and I think you should know too. They use a laser ON your eye, to fix problems. They DON'T give you a laser eyeball to replace your puny and misshapen one. I know, I couldn't believe it either, but it's true. Shoulda taken that guy to court for false advertising.

Check the Expert.

[Anonymous Coward]

Friend of mine once remarked after thinking about it.

"I wasn't sure, every surgeon I met who would perform it was wearing glasses..."

Re:beowulf cluster

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I think that would be what a fly gets when it goes in for Lasik surgery.

Those with whom it went wrong...

[Karpe]

...are not here to tell their stories.

Do not look into laser with remaining eye

[Anonymous Coward]

As we say at los alamos

An even better Idea for than Eye Surgery.

[Timmy D Programmer]

Get breast implants. Then you won't need a girlfriend ;)

Good advice

[photonic]

As a physicist who works daily with (only moderate power) lasers, i might share our old and well known survival trick:

DON'T LOOK INTO LASER WITH REMAINING EYE!

Re:EYE SURGERY

[machoromeo]

Yeah, and I hear that Jim Adler the Texas hammer is a tough smart lawyer.

Re:Jessica Simpson had it done

[ZBM-2]

Ok,here goes my karma.

Rodney Dangerfield quote: "I love girls who wear glasses. You take 'em home,breathe real heavy,it steams up their glasses and they don't know what you're doing."

friends say that it is OK...

[dindi]

one thing to keep in mind :I heard it from a friend:

supposedly it weakens some parts of your eye (dunno exaclty which) and if your head receives big hits (eg you do motocross, martial arts or just get beaten up frequently) there is a chance that your eye just pops out and pours out ...

a friend who is a kempo teacher told me that, it worths a research...

i think it also depends how bad your eye is .. he is almost blind without glasses/lens but he won't go with the operation since he gets kicked in the head 100 times a week ...

Re:Check the Expert.

[Exitthree]

Here's an appropriate story, but with dentists instead of eye surgeons.

There is a small town with two dentists. The town is hundreds of miles from anywhere else that is inhabited, so anyone who visits a dentist visits one of these two. One of the dentists has a sparkling mouth full of perfectly arranged, white teeth. The other dentist has a mouth full (well, half-full) of the ugliest, yellowest, most-malformed teeth anyone has even seen. If you lived in this town, which dentist would you visit?

The answer of course, is the dentist with the nasty teeth, since the dentist with nice teeth obviously visits him for his dental services.

So, perhaps none of those eye surgeons have meet another surgeon they would trust... If they could perform the surgery on themselves, the fact that they all wear glasses might be another matter.

ok for me

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

I itd kd83 ldfjkl 3dfsdklj sdfsdfsdlk j ok. jaghas dkah dks *7jwks happy dksaje fksajhd. httr luck!

My girlfriend got laser eye surgery

[Anonymous Coward]

Gave her near perfect vision. Less than a week later, I was dumped. I don't think this was coincidental.

Re:A horrible disappointment

[222]

If your really set on having a laser eye, im pretty sure theyre part of the Microsoft "new employee package"....

Re:Don't do it.

[Anonymous Coward]

1) I'm a big wuss ...

5) the army and police won't let you join if you've had it, rather tellling I think

Considering your point #1, I don't think point #5 has much relevance

Re:My experience

[flacco]

The pleasure of being able to see...always...and not becoming an invalid if my glasses break is priceless.

plus, if there's a nuclear war that kills everyone but you, and you want to spend the rest of your days reading all the books you never had a chance to read, you don't have to worry that an ironic accident will put the kibosh on your plans.

Re:And the short answer is...

[Mantorp]

My touch typing has improved tremendously, and I always wanted to learn braille.

Hanging up the red and blue tights?

[WillDraven]

I have better than 20/20 whereas before I had something like 600/20

I certainly hope you meant 20/600, because otherwise you've shed yourself of your superhuman abilaty to read at 600 feet as a normal human can at 20 that you inherited from your parents on Krypton.

Waste of Money

[pyrrhonist]

I had laser corrective surgery, and everything was working out fine until I accidentally clicked on a goatse link.

Now I look like Neo at the end of Matrix Revolutions.

Damn you Slashdot!

Re:My experience

[paxil]

My advice is go to a good doctor...

Let me get this straight. Are you suggesting I not go to a lousy doctor?

Mail Order Lasik

[SirModem]

Be careful doing this through mail order. I sent out both of my eyes... only one was returned. Can't even tell if it is mine since I can't see it.

No glasses?

[Punchinello]

How will you conceal your secret identity?

Re:If you're already 20/20 ....

[E_elven]

Night glare? That's what sunglasses are for.

420/20 ???

[deft]

is that where its all red and you can barely hold your eyes open?

a few of my friends do this "420" eyes thing that you speak of.

Re:And the short answer is...

[aqua]

This is going to sound like the total slashdot linux-zealot posting; sorry, but it happened.

In early 2000 the chief software engineer at LASIK came to give a talk before a Software Engineering course I was taking at Sonoma State (worthless CS program, but nevermind). He talked for most of an hour about various parts of the development process, hardware interlocks, millisecond-cutoff crash-detector watchdogs and so forth. Moderately interesting. At the end of a Q&A period, one student asked him what platform LASIK ran on -- since it had been explained that the machines had to be deployed to eye doctors' offices and be easy to use correctly and difficult to use wrongly, etc., etc. The answer, and I swear I'm not making this up, was "Windows 3.1." There was a pause while everyone in the room absorbed this, then he added "But we're considering porting it to Win95."

Hooray for hardware interlocks. :P

Re:One man's experience

[dwillden]

Just a thought :)

Good thought too, guess my Lasik wasn't soo good after all. I managed to miss that. Thanks fer pointing it out.

Re:If I had money to spend...

[CGP314]

The 'intellectual look' is only a bonus for people with thin lenses. I have horrible vision and when I used to wear glasses the lenses were thick enough that my eyes looked beady and strange.

When my glasses get to coke-bottle thickness, I plan to wear contacts and glasses to keep the intellectual look. : )

Re:My experience

[talaphid]

So ... we're completely ruling out the voodun priest?

Re:One man's experience

[Dashing Leech]

BAAFAMUST (Because Acronyms Are Fun And Make Us Sound Technical [nasa.gov]).

Re:If I had money to spend...

[nahdude812]

It all falls back to "God helps those who help themselves." Guy sits on his roof during a raging flood. A helicopter offers him assistance, he says, "God will save me." A boat offers him assistance, he says, "God will save me." A canoe offers him assistance, he says, "God will save me."

In Heaven, he asks God, "Why didn't you save me?" God says, "I sent a helicopter a boat and a canoe, what did you want?"

Re: Experiences with Laser Eye Surgery?

[bitN]

Every ophthamologist (3 total) I have visited over the last 15 years continues to wear glasses. That includes an ophthamologist who is a pioneer/leader in the laser eye surgery field. When I asked one of these ophthamologists if the surgery was safe the good doctor replied: "I still wear glasses don't I?"

And the protective value of eyeglasses against airborne particles and debris is another good reason to stick with them. Besides, you can always have your eyeglass prescription easily and quickly tweaked, too.