Output of: post i-was-afraid-of-the-recovery-not-the-surgery
I was afraid of the recovery, not the surgery
I have been nearsighted for 22 years. Grade 8, first pair of glasses, 1.5 diopters. By my early twenties it had climbed to 4.75 on the right, 5.0 on the left, with 0.5 of astigmatism, and then it stopped. Stayed there for over a decade. I learned to live with it. Glasses on the nightstand, glasses by the shower, glasses on the desk, a spare pair in the bag. That was just the shape of my day.
Friday I got laser surgery. RELEX SMILE PRO. My cornea is thin, so regular SMILE was not an option for me. It cost about 1800 USD after a sale. The no-screen period my surgeon gave me was 24 hours.
the fear was not the laser
I was not afraid of the laser. I was afraid of the days after.
People I trust told me about their recovery. Family, friends, colleagues. Ten days no screens. Two weeks no screens. One person described twenty days of staring at the ceiling. I build my whole life around a screen, a terminal, a keyboard. The idea of losing that for two weeks sounded like losing the ability to work, to think, to be myself. So I filed the surgery under "maybe later" and left it there for years.
The catch is that I never looked into it myself. I let their stories stand in for research. Their recovery was the only data I had, and I treated it as the ceiling.
the version I found was not their version
When I finally decided to change something about my eyes, I started reading. Not much, an afternoon. Enough to learn that the procedures had changed, that there were options built around a short recovery, and that my thin cornea did not automatically rule out surgery. It ruled out one approach and pointed at another. RELEX SMILE PRO was an option for me, and its recovery window was measured in hours, not weeks.
I had spent years afraid of a timeline that did not apply to the procedure I would actually get. The fear was real. The information it was built on was not.
the 24 hours
The surgery went fine. I went home, kept my eyes shut, and did not look at a screen for a day. It was boring. It was not unbearable. I slept, I listened to things, I sat with the boring and it passed.
By Saturday evening I was back at the desk, reading text, writing this. The thing I had treated as a wall was a long afternoon.
That is my recovery, not a promise about yours. The procedure, the prescription, and the person all matter. I am writing this to correct my own assumptions, not to tell anyone what surgery to choose.
what it actually cost
1800 USD, after a sale. That is real money, and I am lucky to be at a point in my life where I can spend it on my eyesight. Not everyone is, and I do not pretend that part is small. But the cost I had been calculating for years was not the money. It was the imagined two weeks of being offline. That cost was fictional. The real one, the money, I could pay.
the rule
Do not let someone else's recovery story substitute for your own research. Their experience is real, and it is also from a different procedure, a different eye, a different year. Medicine moves. The version your cousin had five years ago may not be the version you would get now. Talk to a qualified clinic, get evaluated, and ask what the recovery actually looks like for you.
I waited years because ten people told me about their two weeks. I lost those years of clear vision to a timeline that was never going to be mine.