Day Five

Unfortunately, the blurriness began today. It's irritating because while it's bad enough that, say, a computer screen is hard to see without putting my face very close to it, the prescription on my old glasses is too strong to clear anything up, so I just have to tolerate fuzzy vision for a while. The strangest part is that pre-PRK, my left eye was a good amount worse than my right eye. Right now, I'm definitely leaning on my left eye when I need to see things more clearly, which is something I've never done since I was--what, 8 years old? My optometrist told me that one eye got worse more rapidly than the other because I had a habit of leaning on my left hand while I read, putting my left eye that much closer to the book and compounding the damage done to my left eye because of close reading. Either way, guess that side is getting its chance to lead for the first time in my life!

All the markers of clarity that I used in my previous post (the TV at 8 feet, the door at 15 feet, etc.) are blurry like they were when I was myopic. Obviously, this is part of the healing process, but it reminds me of the reason why I wanted to get LASIK in the first place. I'm not the most patient person at the best of times and I love instant gratification, so it feels like a tease to be able to see so well for a few days (especially since was lucky enough to bypass the terrible pain that most PRK patients experience), and then be able to track it exactly as it leaves again. To be fair, though, I knew that this was coming and, honestly, it just helps to be able to whine about it a little.

I've been reading up on some medical studies about post-PRK epithelium healing (studies done on children, actually, which found that for the kids studied between the ages of 5 and 9, it took an average of 3.5 days for their epithelium to heal completely--damn age onset!) and it really seems like a good deal of lubrication plus resting the eyes (that is, not using the computer as much as I do despite the dryness and irritation it causes) really helped the patients' eyes to heal faster. So now, in addition to the regular anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial drops I'm putting in every 6 hours, I'm going to try to use the lubricating drops regularly in between as well. I have another appointment tomorrow--lets see how it goes!

Today, on a pain scale, was only a 3 out of 10 at most (when I woke up from a nap and my left eye was so dry it wouldn't open).