Jack,
I say don’t do it. I have no experience with it. I don’t know anyone who has had it. So, my opinion is not based on experience at all. Nevertheless…
Protect your vision. It is precious. You could be facing a lifetime of problems if it doesn’t go perfectly. Even if it does go perfectly, will it give you everything you are looking for? What problem are you trying to solve? You don’t want to wear glasses or contact lenses? For me, the choice between glasses and the risk of surgery is easy. I’ll stick with my glasses.
Have you looked into natural vision improvement techniques? Don’t ask your eye doctor about it. He has been taught by the system that it is quackery. But there was a Dr. William Bates of New York, who in the 1930s, did many experiments on animals and worked with thousands of people. He came up with a set of techniques that address the core problem of impaired vision.
You probably know that nearsightedness, myopia, happens because the eye is too long from front to back. The rays of light come to focus in front of the retina and you therefore have blurred vision. In farsightedness, the opposite is true. The eye is too short from front to back. With astigmatism, the eye is not perfectly spherical in the front.
If you believe Dr. Bates, there is a common cause of all of these conditions. The cause is the external muscles that attach to the eye. They become chronically tense and they pull and squeeze the eye out of shape. There are four muscles that attach to the front of the eye – on the top, bottom, left, and right. These muscles move the eye left, right, up, and down. There are two big muscles (the oblique muscles, I think) that almost wrap around the middle of the eye. They rotate the eye in its socket. You can see them it action if you look at your eye closely in a mirror and rotate your head. You can see your eye rotate in its socket (as it tries to stay level as you rotate your head).
These six muscles can pull and squeeze to produce a number of problems. If the two oblique muscles both contract at the same time and stay contracted, they will squeeze the eye and make it too long. Myopia. Nearsightedness. If the four muscles that attach to the front of the eye all contract and stay chronically tense, they can pull the eye back into the eye socket, making it shorter, i.e., farsightedness. If one of those muscles contracts abnormally, it will pull on a section of the front of the eye, warping it out of its perfect sphere, giving you astigmatism.
The problem is that these six muscles are not under voluntary control. So it’s hard to get them to relax. An eye at rest is focused on infinity, which is anything greater than 20 feet. There are techniques geared toward getting the muscles to relax, allowing the eye to return to normal shape, thus returning to perfect vision. They are NOT eye exercises – those muscles are more than strong enough already, especially the powerful oblique pair.
In addition to the relaxation techniques, there are proper vision habits that you will have to incorporate into your day. These habits are how people with normal vision see. People with impaired vision tend to stare. They tend to try to see everything clearly all at once (like a camera). This is not possible due to the layout of the rods and cones (the light receptors) in the retina. You see clearly only in the center of your vision. A person with normal vision will jump around looking at different things, building up a clear mental picture, but “hardware-wise” only seeing one small part clearly at a time. Again, people with poor vision stare. Their eye does not jump around sketching a clear mental picture. These are some of the habits that you once had (when you had perfect vision).
You want to look up the Bates Method. He’s on that sight (edit: site, not sight – interesting typo) that lists quacks (just be forwarned). Oh, and one other thing. He was dead wrong about how the eye focuses. He went against the medical establishment by saying that the eye focuses like a camera – it becomes shorter or longer (via the oblique muscles). This does not invalidate his techniques, however.
Think about when you first got glasses. Was it a time of stress? By looking through the family photo album, I figured out that I got glasses when I went into high school (or maybe it was middle school, now I can’t remember). There was stress that went along with the lowering of my vision. Those muscles became tense (like the neck and shoulder muscles do when you are stressed out). Getting glasses locked it in. More on that in a moment.
I’ll leave you with another thought. Has your prescription changed over the years? Mine certainly has. If the definition of myopia is that the eye is too long, fine. I guess it grew that way. But as a fully-grown adult, how is my myopia getting worse? My eye is getting even longer? How is that possible? The only explanation I have is that Dr. Bates is right – the oblique muscles are squeezing the eye (in my case, even the angle of rotation of my astigmatism changed). Those eye muscles are doing something WRONG. Yet glasses or surgery rewards you with correct vision. It’s not a proper feedback loop. In fact, your muscles have to continue to do something wrong – otherwise you will not see clearly. If those chronically tense muscles start to relax (a good thing), you will not be able to see correctly through your glasses. They will be the wrong prescription. So, those muscles must stay chronically tense. They must maintain a wrong thing in order to produce a right thing.
Glasses, contact lenses, and surgery do not address the root problem. They actually lock it in. Also, what happens when your eyes “get worse” in the future? Do you need surgery again?
This is the book you need –
It’s by Tom Quackenbush, who in my view is the world’s expert on natural vision improvement. His book is THE authority on the subject. You can also obtain Dr. Bates’s original books, but Relearning To See quotes extensively from Dr. Bates’s materials and is much more accessible. He also runs a natural vision center, but he has moved to Holland.
http://www.naturalvisioncenter.com/
So, to wrap this up… Your vision is so essential to the quality of your life that I wouldn’t risk messing it up. Also, vision changes throughout life if you don’t address the root problem. Surgury today is based on your prescription… today. What about tomorrow? And given the possibility of curing your vision naturally (it’s not easy, by the way), why not give that a chance first? Delay the surgery. Buy the book. What’s the rush? I mean, this is serious stuff. The surgeon can wait a few more weeks for you (if you are not convinced by the book). He won’t be heartbroken. Please. I’m not easily persuaded to believe in junk science. I truly believe in the Bates Method. One day I will cure my vision. I’ve been able to cause momentary improvements, but they don’t last (I also don’t stick with the program). My friend was able to produce dramatic improvements in his vision. So, I’ve seen this work first-hand (he didn’t follow through either, so I have not personally witnessed anyone curing their vision – I’ve seen enough to make me a believer, however).
If you go through with the surgery, I truly wish you the very best of luck.