laser eye surgery-opinions please.

[Mirage]

I've been thinking of having this for a few years now and wondered if anyone has any experience/advice for me.TBH I'm not even sure if my eyes are suitable as I'm VERY short sighted.
Thankyou.

I went to Moorfields and it was about £3.5k. That said with very short sightedness glasses, contact lenses and solutions over the years costs a small fortune too.

I can only speak from personal experience and its been brilliant for me.

I just wanted to add in that I had the surgery and it cost approx. £3000 at Accuvision. They were brilliant!

I had my first consultation and was explained all of the risks from a very experienced optometrist who did not pressure me into anything but was very helpful. The recovery was only a few weeks and there was no pain.

Being able to wake up and get in the shower and see everything was amazing. Personally, I don't regret it at all.

My optician said I was too old (47) to do this for short sidedness as it would reset my prescription for reading glasses (at the moment I can read easily without glasses but she said at my age prescriptions change so I need to wait.
Any comments?

I had mine done at Optical Express in Cambridge. Absolutely brilliant, went from -9.5 to perfect vision in one eye and -0.5 in the other.

The surgery is a doddle, literally 10 minutes start to finish.

The £395 is a load of tosh though. That's for eyes with very little correction needed and without all the bells-and-whistles 'extras' that you really need to get a good result. It cost me £3000. I'd pay it twice over - it was SO worth it.

I figured, 10 years of eye tests £300, 10 years of contacts £1200, 10 years of cleaning solutions £600, 10 years worth of 'backup glasses' £500. That's £2600. The eye surgery is permanent.

The surgery works by re-shaping the cornea - the clear bit over the pupil and iris of your eye. It re-shapes it by removing a thin layer.

I'm 42 and will probably need reading glasses soon - but that is completely different to needing glasses for my short-sightedness. Reading glasses are needed because as you get older your eyes don't adjust as well to focus on close things. There's no surgery in the world that will fix that, unfortunately!

hatty, the ability to change focus from distance to near gets worse as you get older.

So initially, you would be fine, but then you would notice a gradual deterioration in your near vision and would have to wear glasses for reading and for computers.

There is one way round this, which is to "undercorrect" one eye so that one eye sees clearly in the distance and the other eye sees clearly at near. If you were thinking of doing this, it would be advisable to try it out in contact lenses first as not everyone can tolerate it.

Hi... my advise, don't do it! If you must, go to Moorfields or similar -your eyes are too valuable to risk "half price discounts"

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Lots of news coverage coming in the next week re refractive eye surgery.