I looked carefully into SMILE and Smart LASIK, went to several hospitals, and decided on Smart LASIK. Had the surgery in January 2023. Smart LASIK feels like the second generation of SMILE LASIK, I guess.
The main reason I got vision correction was that, because of my job, I couldn’t wear glasses, and wearing contact lenses for long hours made my eyes hurt a lot. My eyes looked much prettier with lenses in, but… I had surgery for my eye health.
Before correction, my eyes had extremely severe astigmatism + high myopia. My contact lens prescription was around -7.
The surgery took about 5 minutes, and they put in anesthetic eye drops. Once the anesthesia wore off, my eyes were extremely irritated and painful. My eyes stung so much that normal daily life the next day was impossible. I could feel my vision improving right away even the next day, and because my eyesight had been so bad without glasses, at first it was truly a whole new world. But maybe because my vision was so bad and they had to ablate a lot of cornea, my dry eye was really severe. (This is just my guess, but since they remove more when your eyes are worse, I thought the laser exposure time would be longer and it would be drier ㅋㅋㅋㅋ) I basically lived with artificial tears. Even after several months, my dryness was so bad that I kind of regretted it? It doesn’t feel like I can see as well as I expected. Even now when I go for checkups they say I’m 1.0, but somehow it feels worse than 1.0. These days I still put in artificial tears every day. Maybe my eyes became sensitive after surgery: they get bloodshot when I’m just a little tired / bloodshot when pollen is flying / dry right away from heater wind. Still, living without glasses is convenient. But since I can’t wear lenses, my eyes look kind of dull and unfocused… If I knew all of this and could go back, I don’t think I’d do it ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ I might rather choose a job where I can wear glasses..
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