Pre Operative Comments
After many many years of thinking about doing it I finally took the steps towards getting my eyesight surgically corrected. Since I live in Alberta I decided to go to the Gimbel Eye Center. This page won't have cool pictures (although I am hoping to put up videos) but it will follow my experiences both before and after the surgery. It is not an endorsement for the Gimble Eye Center but a diary of the journey to wearing no glasses.
A little about my eyesight....I have been wearing glasses since I was 9 years old and my eyesight stopped changing when I was in my 20s. My left eye is around -11 diopters and my right around -8.5 diopters with little astigmatism. While I have worn contact lenses I haven't found them comfortable in air conditioned buildings and neither am I supposed to wear them at work as I am in a laboratory environment. I have always been physically active but I enjoy doing activities like reading.
Like most people who decide to go with this surgery, one of the things I am really looking forward to is being able to see the clock in the morning without finding my glasses. The other is loosing the fear of knocking my glasses off the night table and not being able to find all the pieces when a lens falls out of the frame. Surgery will change all this.
Post Operative Comments
Dr. Gimbel commented that it would be interesting to see which eye procedure I liked better as I would have two different methods of correction with the procedures close together.I had an Implantable Contact Lens(ICL) placed in my left eye because my cornea was too thin for the LASIK procedure. My right cornea was fine for the right eye so I kept my choice of LASIK for the right eye.
The best thing about the ICL for me was that I could see the results for the surgery the minute I left the table and could use the eye fairly normally by evening. I thought that was really neat. The surgery was long but not uncomfortable. My eye is comfortable now (5 days later) and my astigmatism improved even though the ICL has no effect on that. Even the drops are not too tedious. I do find that my ICL eye takes longer to "wake up" in the morning and sometimes I have halos. I expect these will go away as the eye heals.
The LASIK surgery was not as comfortable as the ICL although I felt pain for neither. The procedure was very short - 2 minutes but I didn't see the immediate results that I did for the ICL however my LASIK eye has healed better and doesn't have the halos that the ICL eye has. My right eye is more comfortable than my left BUT my left eye has always been more likely to feel dry and be affected by perfumes and such. Also if I get a sinus headache is is more likely to center on the left side of my head SO the level of comfort is more likely a reflection of my physiology rather than a difference between the two corrections.
ICL is positioned to become the surgery of choice as it can be used for any degree of near or far sightedness up to -45 diopters, it is reversible and the lens could, theoretically, be changed if sight degraded. I'm certain that multi focus lens and lenses that correct for astigmatism are in development.
Pre-Op ![]() |
Operation ![]() ![]() |
Post-Op ![]() ![]() |