Lasik Assessment

Posted by HELiX

I went for the LASIK assessment today, which would be perhaps be the most thorough examination of my eyes unless I happen to have some severe visual problem in the future.

Many people would be unfamiliar with LASIK. You see, for one, it stands for ‘Laser-Assisted in SItu Keratomileusis’. Much like what I would yell when a dog is biting out my eye.

Lasik in real world. Uh.

It was over 2 hours long. You can see where’s this going.

First was the pretty typical eye check-up where they’ll measured my near-sightedness and astigmatism. My eyes had a stable 400-325 power of near-sightedness, but my astigmatism was a little less forgiving at 100. Which was weird because the machine measured it to be only 40.

I went into another room where they practically took away enough information to rebuild my eye if humans could.

The sharingan. Unfortunately, NOT a side-effect of Lasik surgery.

They measured my cornea size, thickness, contour and shape with four different machines. How they did it? I have absolutely no idea. One machine flashed bright rotating lights into my eye AND I’M NOT SUPPOSED TO BLINK. Another had these swirls like Penguin’s Umbrella (of the Batman series).

The red-white swirling thing. Not only found at amusement parks and cartoons. But also at your nearest Lasik treatment centre.

Then I entered the third phase where my eyes were abused.

“So now we’re gonna measure your EYE PRESSURE.”

In the medical world, anything associated with pressure usually ends with something squeezing something.

Now, we’re going to measure my EYE PRESSURE!

But really, it was something like this:

They first used some stick-like toy to blow air into my eyes. I suppose by controlling the air pressure from the thingy, they can measure how my eye responds to… blah, whatever.

Then they proceeded to add YELLOW DYE into my eyes, where my tears were yellow. And then a machine poked this lens into my eyes, as shown in the picture above.

Of course, this has been a very brief summary of the whole Lasik assessment process. I have no idea how some methods could perform and obtain the results of what they were intended for.

I was also made to watch a 10-minute video of Lasik surgery. And some eye-drops were added to make my eyes dilate through the examination. And while the optometrists like your pupil to be nice and large by artificially inducing it to grow larger, it really hurts when you walk out into the open after the assessment. Perhaps I was fortunate that today was a cloudy day, so the glare wasn’t that bad. My vision also blurred for about an hour after the process.

Tomorrow, SURGERY.

9:45 PM 11 November 2008