lostinspace:
geoff - would you be willing to share your experience with lasik?
sorry about taking so long. see above message for why.
i'm happy to tell you about my lasik experience. it was not good. prior to surgery i had about a 9 diopter correction in both eyes. this put me in the correctable range, but near the upper end of the range. i did expect that i might need an enhancement, or that my final vision would not be 20/20. i did not expect complete failure in one eye.
had surgery in mar 02, and initial results were not so good. vision only partially improved, although it was mostly correctable. i had double vision in my right eye. then, an enhancement in my right eye in mid 02 to correct double vision. eventually, the flap wrinkled (resulting in blurry vision), and i had a flap lift in Sep 02 to correct that. shortly after that, my vision began to really deteriorate in the right eye, and eventually the cornea began to bulge in an irregular and non correctable manner. that is, i had vision so blurry that i couldn't read a book, and the vision was not correctable in that eye. This lead to the cornea transplant in feb 04.
during this process, i waited the time my surgeon told me to wait before diving (2 weeks is what he said), and then began to dive in a conservative fashion. eventually i began to teach again, and to teach technical diving again. it was after a series of deeper dives that i noticed my vision changing in the right eye ON THE DIVE. i told my lasik surgeon about that, and we worked out a schedule where i would dive at a site near his office, and then have him look at the eye after the dive. he noticed wrinkling in the cornea after the dive that was not present before the dive. the wrinkle would mostly resolve itself after a few days. he did not notice any gas bubbles in the flap, and unfortunately did not take any photos of the eye. the time between dives and exam was less than an hour.
i've written to a navy ophthalmologist (sp?) who is a diving medical officer, and he says the population of technical divers who have lasik is so small that there is no way to predict what will happen. there's no statistical base in other words. apparently divers in general don't have significant problems post lasik, but there's no data about instructors either, that i'm aware of.
so although my experience was sub-optimal (ha!), i had a couple of things that set me apart from the general diving population (instructor and technical diver) and these factors may have contributed to the outcome due to frequency and nature of my dives. there's no way to tell. alternately, maybe my eyes are just way more sensitive to surgery that the average.
i can dive and see pretty well now, but it's taken a few years to get to this point, and i'm not done yet. see above for the cataract discussion.
hope this gives you hte information you wanted. as a disclaimer, i'm not a medical professional, and this is only my experience of what happened to me. it's not a recommendation or advice to anyone.
geoff
