Seeing clearly has changed my life. Reversed childhood trauma from being a geek, caused me to re-live my teenage life with all those girlfriends that I never had, it is the fountain of youth, a winning lottery ticket and the capability to live for all eternity, much like a vampire with a ready supply of victims.

Alright, maybe that is a bit of a exaggeration but the Lasik surgery was still excellent money spent.

The Good News:

-Vision is 20/20. My drivers license now has no restrictions.

-I’ve completely adjusted to not having glasses. No more reaching for them in the morning or feeling naked without them. About 3 months ago I donated all of my used pairs to charity (there are drop boxes in many prescription glasses stores).

-My Televisions/Computer Monitors are still noticeably larger than they were when I was wearing high-diopter glasses. Right now I can see a 46” LCD and it looks at least 5” bigger than it did before vision correction.

-My night vision is about equal to before. I traded big fuzz-ball headlights for slightly different looking snowflake-style headlights. I can see how people would report that their night vision worsened but in my case the degradation was about a equal trade to how it was before the procedure.

The Bad News:

-Occasional Dry Eye – I use drops every 1-2 weeks depending on the weather (read: humidity) and how much I ride my motorcycle or do other high airflow/low humidity activities such as fly on airplanes or drive with air conditioning on high. This isn’t much of a issue or concern, I just carry some instant tears somewhere in one of my bags when I travel or when riding. As of this writing it has been 2+ weeks since I used instant tears.

Normally the dry eye manifests itself as slight discomfort in one or both of my eyes and some blurriness. If one of my eyes has been dry for several hours it won’t focus quite right until I give it a break or lube it.

-I can tell I’ll need reading glasses one day. Before the surgery I was starting to notice it was hard to read small fonts on high-resolution screens (dang all that getting old stuff). After the surgery it’s more noticeable. I’ll contemplate in the future whether to always buy the highest resolution screen possible on new laptops I purchase. Ctrl-+/Command-+ to enlarge fonts in browsers is a godsend.

-My eyes get tired easier than they used to.  At a certain point of night I can keep going, but my eyeballs (normally just one of them unless I’m REALLY tired) starts to tell me to shut them for a bit by getting a bit uncomfortable. I can avoid this issue if I can find 10-15 minutes to close my eyes after work. Usually it’s about 10-11PM when they are telling me to go to bed or at least take a break.

The Verdict:

Still some of the best money I’ve spent. After posting the last Lasik post I started assembling a list of the best and worst things I’ve spent money on for another blog post, other than long-term investments such as retirement and buying a home it’s the top of the list of best money spent. In addition, all my childhood emotional scarring has been healed, and that is what really counts :^).