Are you awake during laser eye surgery?

Hi, it’s Dr. Russell from VSON. When I tell people I’m a LASIK surgeon, some ask me: “Are you awake during laser eye surgery?”

The simple and direct answer is yes. While we can certainly appreciate that being awake during a surgical procedure doesn’t sound like much fun, in any case, LASIK is far from your typical surgical procedure. It takes just a couple of minutes to perform and in expert hands is completely painless.

After having laser eye surgery, the first thing many people say, apart from “wow”, is that they were pleasantly surprised by how easy and painless the whole thing was.

As well as being designed as a minimally-invasive procedure, to avoid any discomfort, anaesthetic eye drops are applied to your eyes before surgery. This means you’ll feel very little during the actual procedure.

And in the effort to make you feel as comfortable as possible, your laser eye surgeon will also communicate with you throughout, explaining the process step-by-step.

Expectedly, one of the most common fears about being awake during laser eye surgery is that you might somehow compromise the result by sneezing, coughing, or moving at precisely the wrong moment.

However, leading clinics only use the most up-to-date technology, including a system that tracks the movement of your eye more than 4,000 times per second. This ensures meticulous accuracy and means that there is virtually nothing you could do to put yourself at risk during the procedure.

To learn more about laser eye surgery, or if you have any questions, schedule a free assessment at VSON here.