Thursday, January 17, 2013

My PRK Recovery: Week Two

Any change in vision I've experienced this week has been incremental and subtle so I won't bother breaking down the week by day.  The biggest difference I noticed from Week One was a marked improvement in my far vision that seemed to be linked to some deterioration in my near vision.  It's a little hard to explain.  Between days 4 and 7, I felt that I was near-sighted, just with a better prescription.  So objects in the distance were blurry but I could hold up my iPhone and see text fairly well.  Now though, even text up close is blurry.  It's not the same kind of fuzziness I previously associated with near-sightedness, however.  It's more a doubling/shadowing of letters, I guess what some people describe as ghosting. So instead of seeing a V, I see something that looks like a W with half of it fainter.  It's like looking through a microscope in a way, and today I found that if I focus my eyes the way I do when I look through a microscope, I can actually bring the ghosted images together.  However, that seems to be a strain and so I'm trying not to do this.  So the blurriness does have clarity to it and I can read.  I am still enlarging my font though, to reduce the effort involved.

As many people have experienced, my vision is best earlier in the day and tends to blur more toward the end of the day.  I noticed this especially today when I was able to load a gel fairly easily this morning but when I was loading another gel in the evening it was quite difficult and I went mostly by instinct.  I was a bit lax with putting in my drops today though so dryness might have been an issue as well.  In general though, the only time my eyes are noticeably dry are in the mornings.  During the day I have to actively remember to put in drops since I don't experience any discomfort related to that, which surprised me.

I believe each day my eyes are getting better but it's hard to really tell if there's a difference from one day to the next.  Improvement with PRK really has to be measured in terms of weeks I think.  I had my two week checkup today and the doctor claims I'm seeing 20/20, which is exciting.  I don't quite believe I'm seeing that well though and hope I continue to improve my distance vision.  Right now I am mostly awaiting a return of clarity in my vision and eventually I hope to see even better than 20/20.  The person who was with me for most of my checkup kept on trying to get me to read 20/15, but honestly all those letters just looked like tiny circles to me.  My next (and ideally last) appointment is the 3 month mark, so sometime in April.  

Despite the mostly cloudy Portland days, I've been religious about wearing my sunglasses whenever I'm outside to prevent scarring and to prevent errant debris from flying into my eyes.  This is no hardship because I love my sunglasses and one of the worst things about being in glasses is not being able to wear sunglasses ever.  Overall I'm extremely happy with my surgery even though the recovery is gradual.  I'm functioning well at home and at work and the pleasure of not needing corrective assistance is always with me.  One interesting thing is how my eyes no longer feel tired at the end of the day.  With glasses or especially contacts, my eyes would often just feel heavy by the end of the day but even mid-recovery, I don't get that feeling post-surgery (aside from those first few days of course).  It makes such a difference in my quality of life.  Looking forward to the next few weeks!

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