Laser eye correction surgery doesn't always provide the happy-happy, fun-fun results that radio personalities seem to be bragging about all the time.
Sometimes LASIK surgery damages peoples' vision quite a bit.
Surgery had turned her world into a blurry, warped collage. "If somebody was standing in front of a light source, whatever was in the background behind them would end up looking like it was on top of them." Not only was there distortion, but Ross saw a veiny veil over everything, as if she were seeing her own eyelid.
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Two weeks after surgery, the numbness wore off and dryness set in. "I'm pouring in drops every five minutes," he recalled. He used so many, in fact, that the skin around his eyes became red and tender, as if from a chemical burn. Conventional eyedrops only made his eyes worse, and lubricating eye gels weren't any use, either. Williams eventually tried to resume playing tennis. But staring at the ball on a windy court caused dry, painful spots -- corneal erosions -- to develop on the surface of his eyes. "I would play once and it would take three weeks to recover," he said. "It feels like you have a stone in your eye."
...Sandy Keller of Torrance began her LASIK nightmare in September 1999. Nearsighted and unhappy with contact lenses, she was encouraged by her optometrist to pursue laser vision correction with a particular eye surgeon. As Keller's court complaint tells it, the blade jammed during the first flap incision, and it was downhill from there. Her tortured odyssey included debris in the eye, wrinkles in the cornea, inflammation, clusters of ingrown cells, and enzymes melting her eye tissue. Life became an endurance marathon of blurred and multiple vision, promises of cure, and gross negligence. By the time her ordeal was over, she had undergone eight laser vision-correction surgeries by three different surgeons. She ultimately learned that her optometrist had a financial interest in the recommended laser center. "I discovered that I was never a good candidate for the surgery due to huge nighttime pupil size, dry eyes for years prior to surgery, and warped corneas from years of ill-fitting contact lenses," she said.
...Richard Miller, a native of Lafayette who now lives in Sacramento, learned LASIK economics the hard way. Since his case would cost $100,000 to litigate and he had only suffered an estimated $50,000 in damages, no lawyer would work with him. "Before my surgery, I had 20/20 vision with my glasses," said Miller, who was nearsighted. "After surgery, I have 20/30 vision, which cannot be corrected by any glasses." His permanently fuzzy vision is accompanied by halos and glare, and he suffers headaches, eye strain, and difficulty driving at night. "My doctor has pronounced my surgery a 'success,'" he said. "Had I known this is 'success,' I would never have had LASIK!"
...Happy LASIK patients are ecstatic, noted Dr. Arthur Epstein in the January 2002 issue of Review of Optometry. "But unsuccessful patients exist in a permanently altered waking nightmare from which there is presently no escape," he wrote. Epstein warned that LASIK is still experimental surgery, and in hindsight could ultimately prove to be a physician-induced health crisis.
Despite voices of warning from Epstein and others, the money machine trudges onward. Last August the FDA gave unanimous premarket approval to a new wavefront-guided LASIK system. Wavefront has been hailed as the next big step, because it allows for more customized eye-reshaping. But study participants were no more satisfied with their surgeries than patients had been during earlier LASIK studies. A full 9 percent of participants evidently were dissatisfied with their Wavefront outcome, and the study found no functional improvement compared to older lasers. The one detectable benefit was that while wavefront still created problems with glare, halos, and starbursts, it created fewer of them than older lasers. But despite all the hoopla, only half of all patients found their vision as sharp after surgery as it had been before with glasses.
...Weighing in at 56 pages, its last few pages were devoted to malpractice prevention. Most damning, however, was something buried on page nineteen. There, at the bottom of a list itemizing more than a dozen complications of LASIK-induced dry eye, appeared a warning to watch for these complications: "depression" and "suicide."
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[Link via ObscureStore.]
