[lukeh]

Originally Posted by masraum

My wife had her eyes done a few months ago, so I feel pretty comfortable answering your question.

There are a couple of ways that they can correct. One is called "monovision" and involves correcting one eye for close vision and the other eye for far vision. Your brain will learn to use each eye for each task. A guy that I work with had his done like this about a year ago, and loves it. His eyes were very bad for many years, and now he doesn't need glasses for any task (close or far).

For my wife, one of her eyes was very dominant. Based on the fact that she reads A LOT, and she had that one eye that was very dominant, they recommended against the monovision. Since she did not get the monovision, she ended up as your doctor described. Before the surgery, she could read books without glasses if she had to, but she did have bifocals to help with reading. Now she has to use the cheap reading glasses that you get at a drug store to read. She absolutely can't see close without reading glasses.

The reason, as it was described to us, is that your eyes have lost flexibility. This has limited their range of focus. If the lenses are corrected through surgery to improve your distance vision, that will move the range of your ability to focus out to work with the distance vision which will mean that you won't be able to focus on the close stuff. You will then need $10 reading glasses for close work.

monovision is the other option, but is apparently not for everyone.

Sounds exactly like what the Doc said. If I have it done I'd be trading my new driving glasses for reading glasses. I figure then why bother with the surgery if either way I end up needing glasses.