Hi, my prescription with contact lenses is -8.0 and -8.5. My pupil size is 8. My eye's are healthy (i.e. no scarring from wearing lenses, no diseases). Is there a high risk of going blind after surgery?

I don't think you should worry about going blind. My contacts were 7.5 and 8.0. My dialated pupil size was 8.5, but in dim light about 5mm. I have had two lasik procedures and am considering a third (currently -.75 and -1). If I were you I would be more concerned about the equipment used and the surgeon's experience. My surgeon has done thousands of these procedures, but uses the Nidek laser. I have had tremendous problems with night vision, halos, and ghost images even in dim light. If your cornea thickness allows a large corrected area, I would look for a laser that had a correction zone as close to your 8mm pupil size as possible. I am happy that I can play sports, jog, ski, etc without correction, but the night vision really is sucks. I would still do it agian. Best of luck.

Michelle,

1. The risk of going blind after lasik is very low but it is real and it has happened.

2. Check out the visual effect simulator at www.surgicaleyes.org. It can give you an idea of what your night vision will be like with 8.0 mm pupils and a small ablation zone. If you proceed make sure you understand the risks and make sure that the laser used will give you the safest ablation zone possible. The Visx, for example, if set to a 6.5 mm ablation zone automatically decreases this to a 5.0 mm ablation zone for myopic corrections over -6D. In your case this would guarantee starring.

3. Ask your doctor to give you a pair of soft contacts to correct you to 20/25 or 20/30. Such an outcome would be considered to be successful and this is an easy way to determine if this is the type of vision you can be happy with (especially if you are unwilling to wear glasses or contacts to see as well as you do now with contacts or glasses).

4. Wavefront lasik is coming. It has now be documented that regular lasik creates lots of aberrations that cause loss of crispness and loss of contrast even in people who are 20/happy. If you are not in a hurry you might wait another year to see how it turns out. The longer you put off lasik the better the results you can expect. As a high myope you might even consider waiting for another year or two for the implantable wavefront contact lenses to see if they would provide you with better vision than regular lasik can offer you now with less risk.

Best of luck,
Jeff