How you prepare yourself

You will get all instructions during the pre-exam but just in short the main points:

• Don’t wear your contact lenses after the pre-exam
• Don’t wear perfume or make-up
• Bring sunglasses
• Arrange for somebody to take you back home or be prepared to take a taxi after the surgery. You will be wearing eye shields and you won’t see much. Enough to get home, but really not much.
• Don’t make plans for the hours after the surgery – it’s best to go home and sleep early.

The operation itself

You are going to be awake during the procedure. First you will receive some antibiotic and some topical anesthetic eye drops. Your eyes will be forced open through some contraptions (think ‘Clockwork Orange’), so that you can’t close them by mistake. If you worry that you might move your eyes during the operation, relax. Modern lasers track your eye movements and adjust automatically. You will be lying on your back facing up and the doctor will instruct you to focus on a point of light above you. Then a microkeratome is used to cut a thin slice of cornea. The doctor then lifts the flap and examines it. If the flap is fine, the procedure continues. Otherwise it stops here.

With the flap laid back the laser is then used to remove a few microns of your cornea. All the numbers were fed into the computer which drives the laser before. The laser actually vaporizes layers of the cornea. The good news is that it’s over in no time and you will hardly feel anything. You might be able to smell what used to be part of your eye. After the laser has finished it’s job, the flap is laid back. There is no stitching or gluing involved – it just sticks.

Then the whole procedure is repeated on the other eye if you choose to have both eyes done the same day. Afterwards you will get protective eye shields taped over your eyes to prevent you from accidentally rubbing them. Remember, the flaps where not glued or stiched on and they need some time to bond with your eyes.

That’s it. You can already see through the little holes of your eye shields and it’s of course tempting to see how clear the vision is. Don’t worry. It will get clearer over time. The best thing now is to go home and sleep. The eye shields will be removed the next day during the first check-up.