Unintended bushy consequences

The spot on my nose where my glasses used to rest (I had a little bony shelf, since it appears my nose grew in around my always-there glasses) now has some eyebrow hairs growing on it. It's more obvious in person than in this picture, but you can see a couple on my nose that I swear weren't there before.

Or perhaps it wasn't possible for me to see them, since in order to see them I'd have to take my glasses off.

4 weeks and 5 days checkup

He (a guy in optometry? amazing) said:
-My left eye has a smidgen of prescription (in the nearsightedness direction) left in it
-My right eye is dead on 0.0 prescription
-My eye pressures have gone from 13 three weeks ago to 18 now. While still being in the normal range, they're summoning me back next week to see if they continue that upward trajectory, and if so I'll get to cut back on the steroid drops
-I kinda already knew this from the web, but the steroid drop schedule is a bit of an art. Nobody really knows how many steroid drops are necessary to prevent hazing, especially with the newer lasers that make smoother ablations from the cornea. He said some places tell people to only take them for a week, and TLC actually used to do 1 month at each drop level (a month at 4 drops/day, then 3, then 2, then 1) and have cut that to 1 week.

Forgot to ask to get a 20/whatever rating, I'll get one next week.

4 weeks and 5 days Macguyver

Left eye:
12pt: 100% (previous best: worse than that)
18pt: 97% (sigh, missed a letter because I was rushing. r != f)
27pt: 97% (same)

Hooray, the left eye is killing it this morning. And for once, I'm having a good eye day on the same day as a eye checkup.

Right eye:
12pt: 100%
18pt: 100%
27pt: 100%

Right eye feels as good, if not better, than my last Macguyver test.

4 weeks-after Macguyver

Bit of pullback on the left eye:
12pt: 75.8% (previous best: ~90%. With glasses: 67%)
Everything else: 100%

The right eye, however, is crazy good today, as it has been all week:
12pt: 100%
Everything else: 100%

The right eye wasn't even close to getting a letter wrong. Everything was absolutely crystal clear. I guess I really do need the 8 and 10pt letters now :-)

Normality very slowly approaches...

Today I start 3 eyedrops per day instead of 4 :-)

3 weeks and a day Macguyver test

Left eye:
12pt: 87% (previous best: 81%. Glasses: 67%)
18pt: 100% (previous best: 97.5%. Glasses: 97%)
All others 100%

Hooray, a new record for both 12pt and 18pt. Still a little ghosting, but clearly not enough to really impede my vision. If we're ranking vision by how functional it is, then I'm clearly well past my old glasses, and consistently so. Of the last 5 tests I've done, 4 of them have had the 12pt percentage higher than I could achieve with that eye with glasses.

Now for the right eye, which has ever exceeded its old with-glasses acuity...

Right eye:
12pt: 90.3% (previous best: 80%. Glasses: 91%)
All others 100%

Close, but not quite there yet. The right eye felt a bit funny today. It felt like I just couldn't see enough detail to make the 12pt letters out, but I guess I could still see enough. I know when I did this with glasses it wasn't a cakewalk either, so I can't say that the fact I have to really strain to make out the 12pt letters is unusual. But it felt like the right eye struggled more to get its 90% than the left eye did to get 87%

All in all, a pretty happy outcome, especially considering I did this at 5pm when things have typically gotten a bit worse compared to mornings.

I did my first country-roads driving at night last night, and it was a little annoying. I definitely have starbursts around bright point sources when my pupils are dilated and they can be distracting, though they don't really interfere with actually seeing things. Also, I can't be sure they're worse than artifacts I used to get at night with my glasses on. The first time I was outside at night post-op, I thought things looked much BETTER, so I can only assume that my artifacts now are better than my artifacts then. It's just that a few more weeks of having fairly good vision has made me more of a connasseur of fine, artifact-free seeing.

Today I came across a stand of reading glasses while doing Christmas shopping and tried them out. The +1.0 glasses really helped my ~2cm to ~5cm range of vision, which I'm otherwise not really able to focus anymore.

3 week update

Still not much to report. I'm not sure if my starbursts at night are getting worse or if the rest of my vision is getting better so that they're becoming more annoying, but I am noticing them more. I wish I had characterized what my nighttime artifacts were before I had the surgery. I know I had them, but now I can't really compare whether things are better or worse. I'm going to assume they're better, because the first time I was out at night post-surgery I had starbursts and still thought the night looked way better than it used to.

My left eye this morning is a little weaker than my right, which has become normal. My right eye is extremely clear right now, which is cool.

General status update:

Ghosts: No, though sometimes I get them on point sources of light like christmas lights.

Day-to-day vision fluctuations: Not really

Morning-to-evening vision fluctuations: Sometimes, but very mild

Chunks of dried eyedrops pulled out of eyelashes: Plenty, especially if I use the liquigel eyeball-grease before (and during) sleep

Lubrication: Haven't needed lubricating eyedrops very much, though I had one fairly dry day this week where I needed a couple drops during the day and a drop at night

Phantom glasses: I still look for and occasionally remove my nonexistent glasses before and after showers, bed, and workouts. This shows no sign of improving

Driving: Driving is way better without glasses.

Close vision: I noticed I stop being able to focus on things a bit farther away from my face than I used to, which is expected and fine. No-one needs to focus 4cm away.

Visual acuity: I'll do a macguyver test tomorrow. Not expecting much improvement.

Macguyver Charts over time

Progress is steady, but I'm now officially wishing I had put 10pt or 8pt letters in the test. Hopefully I'm eventually going to start getting 100% on 12pt letters, and then I won't have a way to measure progress beyond. The charts are different because my initial attempt at the right eye chart didn't space the x axis proportional to date. Come to think of it, I'm not certain the left eye chart did it properly, but oh well.

Morning Macguyvering

This is 16 days post-surgery. For those who are curious (or have forgotten), the macguyver test is a little application I wrote that shows letters of various sizes on the screen, and I have to correctly input which ones are shown. At the end, it tells me what percentage of each size of letter I got right. My monitor is 23.2" across, and my head ends up about 6ft back from it during each test.

Left eye:

12pt: 79% (previous best: 81%. Glasses: 67%)

18pt: 97% (previous best: 97%. Glasses: 97%)

All others 100%

On the 12pt, this was much, much better than yesterday afternoon, which was kind of expected. It felt more like I was seeing letters and less like I was guessing.

Right eye:

12pt: 80% (previous best: 80%. Glasses: 91%)

All others 100%

This actually felt a little worse than yesterday, but that's probably just because the left eye felt so much better.

In conclusion, my vision varies widely as things heal. Which I already knew, but now have more numbers for. Weeeeee.

I haven't had to put lubricating eyedrops in overnight for the last 2 nights, which has been nice. Not having my eyelashes glued together when I wake up = happiness.

A little pullback

For the last couple days I've felt my vision wasn't quite as good as it was last week, but I keep not having time to do Macguyver tests to back that up.

...until now

Left eye:

12pt: 56% (previous best: 80.6%. Last saturday afternoon: 68%)

18pt: 97% (previous best: 92%. Last saturday afternoon: 92%)

27pt: 93% (previous best: 97%. Last saturday afternoon: 96%)

All others: 100%

So it got a little worse in my left eye, although a direct comparison to Saturday afternoon last week indicates that it's only a very small amount worse in the 12pt category (68->56), and a wash in the other categories. I'll try to remember to do this again tomorrow morning when my vision tends to be strongest.

Right eye:

12pt: 79% (previous best: 76%. Glasses: 91%)

18pt: 100% (previous best: 100%. Glasses: 97%)

All others: 100%

After the left eye which felt blurry and ghosty, the right eye felt absolutely crystal clear. Obviously not that crystal clear because I still missed 1-in-5 letters and am still underperforming my glasses, but I could see (without straining) details like the white space in between the tines of uppercase E, when normally I'm just inferring it's an E based on the shape. It was very cool, and I hope there are more performances like that in my future.

Quality report: I feel like a 79% success rate understates how good my right-eye vision was, and I also feel like the 56% success rate overstates how good my left-eye vision is. I had very little confidence with each 12pt letter in my left eye. Pretty much everything got guessed as an I or f (tall skinny letters), a, s, or z (compact letters), and it feels like I got lucky that they actually were. The right eye only messed up tough-to-distinguish letters like lowercase r and and lowercase i and j, which look very similar in the font I use for the test.

Ran out of medium-viscosity artificial tears

Now it's only eye-snot at night :(

On the plus side, I pretty much never have to put tears in during the day. My eyes are staying nicely lubricated by themselves. But at night, they do get a bit dry with my eyes closed.

Sorry for the lack of updates. There isn't going on vision-wise. It's still quite good, still doesn't vary much from morning to night, and I can still function with all my computers on their normal resolution and font size. In 1.5 weeks I get to have fewer steroid drops - that's really the next milestone to hit.

Christmas lights are awesome

Some random thoughts:

I love seeing the fine little pinpoints of light from a distance. Except for the very blue/violet ones, they never focus right.

It's still very weird for me to rub my eyes and not have to take glasses off beforehand.

On that note, it's still very weird pretty much every time I get up and don't have to find my glasses. I think that'll take a very long time to wear off.

My aim with the eyedropper is getting worse. I've been hitting my eyelashes, eyelids, and below my eye far more than I should.

I wonder what I should do with the percocets that I never used.

Still a bad-vision day

Things are still a little fuzzier than normal here at work. I haven't had to turn down the resolution or biggify any text, but things are noticeably worse than yesterday.

Day 11 Checkup

Had an eye checkup today.

Corneal healing is "a little faster than average", with still lots of remodeling to go.

I hit all the things on the 20/25 lines, and about 2/3rds on the 20/20 line. Rs, Gs, Bs, Os, and Qs are all awful letters, especially in the snellen chart font.

Ocular pressure is fine (this can be a concern with steroid drops, but mine has barely moved from my pre-op values).

Now that I'm at work, I see that I'm actually having a bit of a bad vision day. Things are a bit fuzzier than they were yesterday or on Friday. However, that might be a side effect of the (possibly numbing) eyedrop and eyestain the doctor put in to check ocular pressure, which haven't quite worn off yet.

I asked what my pre-operation vision was with glasses, and I was apparently a solid 20/20 with a little bit of the 20/15 line.

Checking the "eyes get worse during the day" hypothesis

Many PRK blogs mention that their vision gets worse during the day and I have noticed mine slip a bit, so I wanted to see how much worse mine gets during the day. I did these tests in the same order, with the same # of artificial tears, same lighting, same computer (I always use the same lighting and same computer).

Left eye:

12pt: 69% (this morning: 81%)

18pt: 92% (this morning: 92%)

27pt: 96% (this morning: 97%)

all others 100% (this morning: 100%)

Right eye:

12pt: 74% (this morning: 76%)

18pt: 100% (this morning: 90%)

all others: 100% (this morning: 100%)

So there appears to be a little truth for me. Both 12pt numbers dropped a little, and I did notice a few more artifacts getting in the way.

Day 8 - Macguyver test

187 hours after surgery.

Left eye:

12pt: 81% (previous best: 40%. Glasses: 67%)

18pt: 92% (previous best: 93%. Glasses: 96%)

27pt: 97% (previous best: 93%. Glasses: 94%)

40pt: 100% (previous best: 100%. Glasses: 100%)

60pt: 100% (previous best: 100%. Glasses: 100%)

91pt: 100% (previous best: 100%. Glasses: 100%)

I'm going to count that as "better than glasses". Woooooooooo!

Right eye:

12pt: 76% (previous best: 56%. Glasses: 91%)

18pt: 90% (previous best: 88%. Glasses: 97%)

27pt: 100% (previous best: 94%. Glasses: 100%)

40pt: 100% (previous best: 100%. Glasses: 100%)

60pt: 100% (previous best: 100%. Glasses: 100%)

91pt: 100% (previous best: 100%. Glasses: 100%)

Not quite as good as the left eye, but still very good. Righty will hopefully cross the glasses threshold in the next couple days. There may be a difference in lubrication here too - before I did the left eye, I doused both in artificial tears (they usually increase acuity a bit), and maybe those had dried up by the time I did the right eye. Although today it felt like they hindered my vision on the left eye, so it's hard to tell if they had an effect.

Quality report: no ghosts, no halos, my close-up vision is excellent, my distance vision is excellent, I can't really find anything to complain about.

Longish walk at night

Earlier I mentioned briefly that I haven't had any halos. I should elaborate on that - my night vision is better than it ever has been. The only complaint I have is that if I look up at the stars, currently there is a ghost that doubles the star up. I'm hoping the ghosts will clear up eventually, and based on other people's blogs they do.

If I look at a car headlight, the only truly bright part is where the headlight is. There's a shiny bit around the headlight, but far less than I used to have with glasses and my old vision. Given that night vision is supposed to be the #1 victim of refractive surgery, this seems like a very happy result.

Eyelids and eyeballs do go together

I think I had my first eyelid-glued-to-eyeball event last night. At about 1:30am, I suddenly opened my eye (I think it was a reaction to a dream) and it hurt on the right side mildly. It wasn't super-painful, but it definitely hurt more than an average eye-opening. My vision is still good this morning though, so I don't think any damage was done.

This is a far cry though from some accounts I've read, where people literally can't open their eyes in the morning and its extraordinarily painful. I've had some experiences with that, but it was because my eyedrop-covered upper eyelashes were glued to the lower eyelashes.

Day 6

My distance vision felt amazing today, and my close-up vision seems to have improved so that I wasn't useless by the end of the day at work (although I still had the low resolution on the monitor).

Macguyver test for the right eye (day 6 = surgery + 148 hours)

12pt: 56% (previous best: 8%. Glasses: 91%)

18pt: 88% (previous best: 58%. Glasses: 97%)

27pt: 94% (previous best: 77%. Glasses: 100%)

40pt: 100% (previous best: 100%. Glasses: 100%)

60pt: 100% (previous best: 97%. Glasses: 100%)

91pt: 100% (previous best: 100%. Glasses: 100%)

Holy crap. Just yesterday I was complaining that I couldn't even find the 12pt letters with my left eye, and today I found every single one and correctly labelled more than half. I am rapidly approaching my glasses accuracy. Some of the 18 and 27 misses were actually just typos.

Quality report: Still some ghosting. More than 1 of the 18 and 27pt letters were missed because a ghost letter interfered with the real one to prevent me from figuring out what it was. Some of the complex letters (like lowercase e or a), at the right size, looked like spaghetti because of ghosting. The good news is that the letter-size being affected by this phenomena is shrinking, which means that the ghosts are appearing closer to the real letter. On the last right-eye test, the 60pt and 91pt letters had some misses due to ghosting.

And since these take way less time when eyes are operating well, I did my left too:

12pt: 40% (previous best: 17%. Glasses: 66%)

18pt: 69% (previous best: 83%. Glasses: 93%)

27pt: 89% (previous best: 93%. Glasses: 100%)

40pt: 100% (previous best: 100%. Glasses: 100%)

60pt: 97% (previous best: 100%. Glasses: 100%)

91pt: 100% (previous best: 100%. Glasses: 100%)

So less of an improvement than the right side and less absolute performance, but I measured this one yesterday (so less improvement would be expected over the 3-day gap the right eye got), and it was my worse eye to begin with (so less absolute performance should be expected). Still, very impressive. This eye is nearly performing at my glasses level. I'm looking forward to my snellen test on tuesday...

Ghosting is certainly far more prominent and stronger on the left eye.

If this rate of improvement continues, I am going to regret not testing sub-12pt letters with glasses.