Laser Surgery Side Effects: Would I Do It Again?

Laser Eye Surgery downsides...

Here’s an exhaustive list of my laser eye surgery side effects and the answer to the most commonly asked question I get regarding LASIK, which is ‘would you do it again?’

I say a list of side effects, there are only really three annoying things that have happened to me post-eye surgery. And, almost two years later, I am still trying to decide whether they’re annoying enough to negate LASIK’s brilliant, life-changing benefits.

But before we get started on the non-list I’m going to do that frustrating thing where I make sure that everyone is caught up with the relevant previous posts. They provide all of the necessary context and background and there are some great references to James Bond’s Goldfinger that simply shouldn’t be missed, so make sure you click through and read them if you’re new to my laser eye surgery story.

For a short history of my failing eyesight, followed by some of the reasons I said I’d never consider eye surgery, read this post here:

Laser Eye Surgery: Why I Said Yes

For a summary of the surgery itself, a look (lol) at the practicalities of post-surgery eye care and also a side-note about how bad I am with all drugs, including, it seems, tranquillisers, read this one:

Laser Quest: What Eye Surgery Felt Like

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In this, the third and final post (unless I can find a way to eke out this content even more) I want to talk about the downsides of my LASIK procedure. Things that may possibly have swerved me away from surgery had I been able to predict the impact they’d have on my day-to-day life. A regular debate that I have with myself is whether these perceived downsides outweigh the positives of the surgery and it’s a difficult one to be sensible and detached and scientific about because it really depends on my mood that day and what sort of work I’m making my eyes do.

Let’s just start by saying that my vision, on the whole, is absolutely phenomenal. I can read the small print on food packages, the tiny writing on the lid of a lipstick and tell, from ten paces, whether a wasp is in a good or bad mood because of his/her facial expression. (Yes I can also sex a wasp from ten paces, it’s a useful skill.)

In all seriousness, as someone who couldn’t even glance at their iPhone screen without glasses on because it gave them such intense and immediate eye strain, the fact that I now don’t need glasses to see my computer, iPhone or camera display is nothing short of miraculous. Especially seeing (lol) as though I spend vast proportions of my days staring at the aforementioned things for very long periods of time.

And this is what I wanted from my LASIK surgery: I wanted to be able to work and read and go about my day without having to wear glasses. I wanted to be able to close my laptop and hop into my car to drive to the shops without having to change from one pair to another. I wanted to be able to film makeup videos without first needing to wait four hours for the red glasses marks to disappear from the bridge of my nose and now all of these things are possible. In fact, I don’t even think about them anymore - they’re a given. It’s almost as though the glasses-wearing Ruth never existed.

How can there be any downsides to this situation, I hear you ask? I shall tell you. I’d like to list them, but - as I said at the start of the post - there are only really two or three and one of those has almost entirely rectified itself anyway. Let’s start with that one, because it’s a shorter and easier thing to write about.

Eye dryness. Never really had it prior to LASIK: do have it now. It’s not life-affecting, in that I regularly sit there with my head in my hands questioning all of my life choices and wishing for an early death, it’s more of an occasional annoyance. I didn’t even realise that what I had was dry eyes, for ages, because they weren’t scratchy and itchy in the way I assumed dry eyes would be. They weren’t crackly, like kindling.

No: my dry eyes feel sort of gummy, as though there’s a strange film over them, and they often seem as though they have debris stuck to them. Dust. Fluff. The carcasses of very small flies.

I would say that this dryness is quickly and easily alleviated with the use of drops (I like Hycosan Extra, which are both extra-powerful and preservative-free) but still, it’s a sensation I didn’t have to deal with until now. It simply wasn’t on my radar. Would I have been more hesitant about the eye surgery had I been able to see (lol!) into a crystal ball and witness first-hand how eye dryness might affect my general standard of life? I think that it definitely would have given me momentary pause but honestly? No. I still would have been full steam ahead.

(It’s worth noting, also, that OCL Vision took eye dryness and the risk of worsening eye dryness incredibly seriously. Even before I had my consultation I was asked several times whether I suffered with it and the surface of my eyes were checked thoroughly for any signs as part of the initial set of examinations. I seem to remember that the existence of eye dryness was one of the criteria for an unsuitable candidate.)

So then, eye dryness. If I had to rate it as a negative, or downside of LASIK, I’d give it a barely lukewarm 3/10. A meh. Bearing in mind that the positives of LASIK would be a 10/10 - I mean, I have better than twenty-twenty vision, I’m virtually a cyborg - you can see (ha!) that so far the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

But let us move onto the side effect that is (was) more of a problem: night vision. My night vision has never been good, but LASIK took it to a new level of dire. Driving home from Cardiff, one night last year, I did start to panic that I would never be able to drive at night again because I could hardly see a thing. I drove for an hour and a half pressed against the steering wheel with my face almost touching the windscreen, pootling down the slow lane at fifty-five miles an hour like, well, like someone who absolutely should not have been driving.

Not only were the oncoming lights glaring at me to the point where I could see little else, I was unable to focus on road signs that previously I’d have been able to read with ease. I felt really vulnerable and scared and, above all, angry at myself for pissing around with my eyesight when I would have surely been more than fine living out the rest of my life swapping between my three different pairs of glasses. (A pair for every seeing occasions!)

I think that was the one time where I felt really regretful about my eye surgery. For what good were my bionic cyborg eyes if I couldn’t drive in the dark? How would I potentially escape from a Zombie apocalypse (I think about this regularly)? What would I do if my next job was a spy job with MI6 and involved frequent missions around the country under the cover of darkness?

Thankfully, there was an easy fix here. I went to Vision Express and asked them to give me a thorough eye exam. Because I wanted a totally unbiased view (haha!) on my eyesight I refused to answer any questions from the receptionist, the eye-puffing-air-test person or the actual optician about whether I wore glasses, had ever worn glasses or felt as though there was something worrying about my sight. I wanted a clean slate. You tell ME what you think of my eyes.

As it turned out, what they thought of my eyes was this: perfect vision. Just…perfect.

‘But I can’t see at night!’ I blurted out, slightly annoyed that there was no real explanation for my near-blindness during the hours of darkness phenomenon.

‘Ah yes,’ said the (very calm) optician. ‘I’ll give you a very, very low prescription pair of anti-glare glasses for that, it’s normal.’

He also said some stuff about perception and how when your eyesight is amazing in most respects the slightest inadequacy feels monumental and catastrophic, but I can’t remember his exact words and don’t want to misquote him. There was also something about intensely using your eyes to focus at one distance and then suddenly trying to get them to work differently at a very new distance, but again, can’t remember.

What I gleaned from it was this: if something is generally perfect then anything less-than-perfect will feel terribly annoying.

Anyway, the glasses came and I put them on when I was driving in twilight (sounds romantic, was trying to catch a train at an ungodly hour) and BLOODY HELL, my vision was absolutely faultless! I couldn’t believe it! Teeny, tiny prescription (I think -0.75 on just one side?) and suddenly I had bionic eyes for close-up, bionic eyes for distance and now bionic eyes for darkness too. Quite honestly, I felt invincible.

Annoyance rating? Now? 1/10.

This left just one downside. One annoyance. It is strongly linked, but not so easily solved. I have the same problem with my vision being unclear - I mean really quite unfocused and hazy - if I go from brightly lit spaces into darker ones. So it could be that I’ve been outside in the garden and I come back inside the house - the kitchen, especially - and it takes a fair while for my eyes to adjust. Walking into shaded areas, like forests, multistorey car parks, darkened hotel lobbies, they all pose quite a problem for me. I mean it’s not as though I go actually blind and crash into things, it’s just an inconvenience. And again, because I’m so used to my eyesight being brilliant for everything else, it feels a hundred times worse than it is.

The problem with this scenario is that I can’t really bung a pair of specs on to solve it. I’ve tried this, and it absolutely does the trick, but it would mean that I’d have to carry a pair of glasses about with me permanently on the off-chance I might enter a wooded area, or suddenly decide to crawl through a tunnel. (Note: never going to happen, I hate tunnels, but you get the gist.)

It is, I would say, the major compromise for me with the entire laser surgery experience. It’s also not so pin-sharp perfect at a very specific distance - say 15-20m - regardless of lighting conditions, as though there’s a sort of weak spot to my vision, but that seems to depend on how much I’ve been staring at a screen beforehand.

I knew that there would always be some sort of compromise; the way that my vision was corrected meant that one eye was better at one thing and the other was made better at another thing and that together, they’d balance each other out and play nicely. Which is not at all the scientific official description I was given but this is what happens when you don’t carry a Dictaphone around with you or record things using voice-note like proper journalists do.

And I am certain that my screen usage and intense close-up focus doesn’t help, but the truth of the matter is that I am tied to doing long periods of work on screens and will be for the foreseeable, unless Netflix buy the rights to How Not To Be A Supermodel and make it into a hit TV series.

Regardless, it’s definitely the weak link. And what would I rate this particular not-being-able-to-see-perfectly-in-lower-light-or-sometimes-also-at-a-very-specific-distance thing? As an annoyance, out of ten?

If I am being completely honest and doing away with the fear that I’ll upset someone, including my lovely surgeon Allon Barsam, I’d give it a 6/10 annoyance factor. I think it could be reduced to a 4 if I could just get my head around the fact that a lot of it is a perception issue, or if I actually followed advice and exercised my eyes at different focus distances, but I am trying to be perfectly frank. It’s a 6.

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Which leads us to the million dollar question: would I get eye surgery again? If I could turn back time and knew precisely what the downsides would be?

Reader: I would. The procedure itself was painless, the recovery fuss minimal. And if I hadn’t started taking my new bionic eyesight for granted almost the second I had it, there would be absolutely no hesitation in my recommendation. I mean come on! I’ve been typing away for two hours now and I don’t have a jot of eye strain and I’m NOT WEARING GLASSES! I never need to wear glasses! Do I tend to focus (hahaha) on the low-light-vision problem because the rest of my vision is so seamlessly good? Yes. Do my eyes occasionally get dry and then irk me? Sure. But I don’t think that these things particularly impact my life on a daily basis: the benefits of LASIK are ever-present, from the moment I wake up until the second I turn off the light.

Crikey, that was a long old post to get down to the answer - apologies to those who would have preferred an AI-style summary. Although quite often those Google ones seem to be very inaccurate, don’t you think? I’m worried at how frequently I assume that they are the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They could be feeding us all kinds of lies and distractions…

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