A review written from memory by someone in their 2nd year after SMILE LASIK.
1. Location Pros: The building is very big and clean. There is a Kyobo Book Centre in the same building, so it seems nice to spend time there if you have time to spare or if guardians are waiting. The parking lot is well set up, and there are many restaurants once you go out to the main road, so it is good for eating when you have extra time. Cons: Traffic is insanely bad whether it is a weekday or weekend. The elevators differ by building section, so you may get a little lost.
2. Consultation wait There is waiting fairly often. It is not like <waiting 1 hour at once!>, but more like <waiting 10-20 minutes 3-4 times>, so the wait feels longer and more boring. I booked the consultation on a weekday morning, and they said the detailed examination would take about 2 hours, but the actual detailed exam took about 30 minutes, and the rest was all waiting time.
3. Consultation process Pros: The consultant compares the surgery types, methods, progress, pros and cons, etc. in detail. Even when I asked questions, they answered in detail, so I got the impression that the consultant understood the surgery well. The consultation took about 20 minutes. Cons: Classic 900,000 won ➡ 500,000 won Prime 1,500,000 won ➡ 790,000 won Laser Fit 2,100,000 won ➡ 1,200,000 won SMILE 2.7 million ➡ Ask the person in charge I went through a university partnership, but they explained that the “Classic,” “Prime,” etc. written here are all older methods that are not done much these days. They said even this hospital does not do those surgeries much and explained the LASIK/LASEK they do nowadays; you can think of it as basically +1,000,000 won from those prices. I went thinking it would be around 1,000,000 won based only on that, but in reality I was a little flustered by the price in the high 1,000,000 won range. I recommend checking the prices carefully in advance before going. I don’t know why they wrote it as a partnership if they don’t really do those. After the consultation, I decided to do SMILE LASIK for 2.3 million won. It felt a bit like pushing/recommending and sales tactics, so it was not pleasant.
4. Waiting for surgery If you book surgery at 2 p.m. and go in, you still have to wait a little inside. There, you put on something like a gown, get eye drops put in, wait again, and then enter the operating room. People waiting, people changing clothes and leaving, and medical staff were all coming and going, and it felt busy, so I felt disoriented. Right before entering surgery, while I was waiting, they quickly rattled off postoperative precautions that I had not heard during the consultation. They were obvious precautions like no drinking or smoking, but I was flustered because they quickly said them and left while everything was hectic.
5. Surgery process When you lie on the surgical chair, they put on a device that prevents you from closing your eyes. They put anesthetic drops like eye drops into the eye, so there is no pain, but you can feel the doctor touching your eye. Then some device is placed over the eye, and you see a red dot, like the red balloon during an eye exam. They tell you to keep looking at it. At this point, they kept saying, “Don’t close your eyes. Don’t tense your eyes,” so I got a little scared. If you keep looking at this red dot, with slight dryness and warmth, it becomes completely cloudy from the edges, as if frost is forming over the eye, and you can’t see. This is the scariest moment, and after the doctor does something snip-snip, you can see ahead again, though it is still cloudy and blurry. When this process is repeated on the other eye, you can see ahead again.
6. Immediately after surgery After surgery, I got up on my own feet and moved to the recovery room holding the nurse’s hand. Then I sat in something like a climbing chair and used a machine to warm-compress my eyes for about 30 minutes, then changed clothes again, put on sunglasses, and left. I went in for surgery at 2, and when I left it was 4. I think you should expect the total surgical process to take about 2 hours.
7. Postoperative progress Before surgery, I had both myopia/astigmatism and was in the negative range, but after surgery my current visual acuity is 0.8/0.9. First of all, because it was SMILE LASIK, it did not hurt at all. It did not hurt during recovery either. My older brother had LASIK and was in so much pain he thought he would die, but for me it was just a little dry. I have slight glare/halos and dry eye syndrome, but this really improves if you consistently use eye drops and a heated eye mask! Highly recommend heated eye masks
※ After surgery I went for regular checkups, and no matter how I looked at it, it was not 1.0, but they kept saying it was 1.0, so I went to another hospital for a vision test and, as expected, it was 0.8/0.9. You could say why make a fuss over only a 0.1-0.2 difference, but it strongly felt like they had fixed the result at 1.0 and gave it to me, rather than actually measuring my vision. So I didn’t trust the test results and deliberately went to another hospital to measure it separately. This was kind of bad.
Overall review: There were times here and there when I had a reality check because it felt like an assembly-line clinic, but it was nice that I could have the exam and surgery on the same day. But at the end, the way they inflated my visual acuity or pushed recommendations during the consultation was too blatant, so there were times I felt a bit offended. Still, the points I felt were disadvantages were personal and could vary case by case, so I think it is a mid to upper-mid level clinic.
#SMILELASIK #Ophthalmology
This review is for a surgery review pursuing reconstruction.