I've been very nearsighted since I was about 8-9 years old. I had glasses exclusively for about five years, then contact lenses (monthly disposables) for 15 or

I've been very nearsighted since I was about 8-9 years old. I had glasses exclusively for about five years, then contact lenses (monthly disposables) for 15 or so. I enjoyed contacts well enough, but did not enjoy the hassles with them - cleaning them and swimming without them were my biggest annoyances. I haven't been sold on LASIK because of the risk of permanent side-effects, such as the light haloes, starbursts, night vision issues, and dry eye. I tried orthokeratology - wearing a special prescription hard lens for eight hours a night to gradually reshape the cornea. I liked the idea that it was completely reversible, and the downside of wearing the lenses at night wasn't a big deal for me (they were never completely comfortable, but they didn't bother me after the first couple nights). The problems I experienced with the ortho-k lenses were two-fold, which would have affected me permanently had I went with LASIK: 1) my cornea is too thin for the large amount of correction I need, and 2) my pupils are too large. 1) Thin cornea: ortho-k and LASIK require material with which to work. When there's not enough cornea to mold/burn, the procedure results in weak correction. Solution? Wear contacts. Lame. We're back at square one. 2) Large pupils: my pupils are apparently freaky large in low light. The area of the cornea that gets molded was large enough for normal-to-bright light, but in low light the molded area was too small. That resulted in terrible haloes. Solution? Take glaucoma eye drops that shrink one's pupils for 8-12 hours. I didn't like being dependent on a drug in that way. After three attempts over many months to enlarge the molded area, we gave up. My cornea was just too thin to be able to mold a large enough area. My eye doctor said that because of my thin corneas and large pupils, if I got LASIK surgery I would have suffered the same problems with weak correction and terrible haloes and other vision artifacts in low light. So I'm very glad I went the non-permanent route first. Luckily with ortho-k, I just had to stop wearing the sleep shaping lenses for a week to revert to my normal nearsighted vision. I'm back to my monthly disposable contact lenses, and am happy I can see the stars clearly and be able to drive at night again. I would definitely recommend checking out ortho-k, though - I wasn't a good candidate, but I'm sure many people are.