What Is It Like to Get LASIK? A Carrot Eye Tech Tells You Her LASIK Patient Experience — From the Massage Chair to the Clear Morning After
Eight hours after her LASIK procedure, Bryn woke up from a nap in her aunts’ house in Mesa, grabbed her phone, and started reading her texts. Then she stopped. She could read them. No squinting. No stretching her arm to find the focal point. No glasses on the nightstand she needed to reach for first.
“I was immediately overwhelmed,” she said. “Reading my phone was nearly impossible without my glasses and suddenly it was easy.”
Bryn is a certified ophthalmic assistant at Carrot LASIK & Eye Center in Mesa, AZ. She operates the LASIK lasers during surgery. She takes pre-surgical scans of patients’ eyes every day. She has watched hundreds of people go through the exact experience she went through herself five months ago, and she can tell you — in clinical detail and in personal terms — what it is actually like to be a LASIK patient.
She had been told for years that she wasn’t a LASIK candidate.
Before LASIK, Bryn wore glasses for hyperopia, which caused her lenses to magnify her eyes outward. She also had significant astigmatism. “Christmas was excessively twinkly and driving at night was disorienting,” she said. Her optometrists had told her repeatedly that she didn’t qualify for LASIK. A surgeon at Carrot looked at her scans and told her she did.
“I thought he was joking,” she said. “He wasn’t. I was beneath the laser two days after that.”
Candidacy screening at Carrot LASIK & Eye Center includes an Advanced EyeAnalysis, a thorough evaluation that determines which procedure is the right fit for each patient’s eyes. For Bryn, it took her own Carrot EyeAnalysis and one conversation to go from “not a candidate” to scheduled for her procedure.
Knowing exactly what would happen as a LASIK patient made her less nervous, not more.
People preparing for eye surgery sometimes worry that understanding the mechanics of what’s happening to their cornea mid-procedure will make the experience more unsettling. Bryn’s experience ran the opposite direction.
“When it comes to surgery, some people prefer ignorant bliss and some prefer to know exactly what is going on. I fall into the latter,” she said. “I loved knowing the surgical process, the biology, and understanding the safety mechanisms of the technology used.”
She also trusted the team performing the procedure in a way most patients cannot imagine — she had worked alongside them for months. “It is a leap of faith to trust a surgeon and a clinic, especially with your eyes,” she said. “For me it wasn’t a leap at all. These people are the most trustworthy, knowledgeable, and caring people that I know. I’d call them in a personal emergency.”
Carrot LASIK & Eye Center is a veteran and physician-owned practice, and the surgeons trained with the US military before entering private practice. Part of the clinic’s standard protocol is that every surgical patient receives the surgeon’s personal cell number before their procedure. Bryn said seeing patients’ reactions to that detail never gets old.
“They are always very touched. Now I understand exactly why.”
The LASIK procedure itself — step by step, in Bryn’s words.
Bryn woke up the morning of her procedure excited and, until she sat down in the complimentary massage chair in the pre-surgical area, relaxed. “The techs kept me company, made me laugh, and gave me drugs so ultimately it was very stress free,” she said. “I got my lunch lady hair net and I was off.”
Once she was in the procedure room, she received a carrot plushie (a Carrot surgical suite staple, named Alan) to hold during surgery. Her surgical team asked her to confirm her name and the procedure she was having. Her eyelids and surrounding skin were sterilized. Dr. Hammond entered in his Superman scrub cap, placed a lid speculum to hold her eyes open, gave her numbing drops, and after that, she felt nothing.
“The first laser was so quick — 18 seconds to be exact,” she said. “I saw a green light and things got a little blurry. It was so cool.” She moved to the second laser. “I saw a red and green light show, smelled the ozone of the laser, and it was a piece of cake.”
That smell is one of the details patients most often ask about beforehand. The laser used at Carrot is a cold laser — it does not burn tissue. The smell is ozone produced by the laser itself. Bryn addresses this directly with her own patients now. “Contrary to popular belief, the laser is NOT burning your eye,” she said. “You also do not see the doctor coming at your eyes with tools. Just cute little red and green lights.”
She stood up from the table and noticed the difference immediately. Her first words were:
“Wait, I can, like, see!”
The first hours after LASIK surgery.
Research consistently shows that over 96 percent of LASIK patients achieve 20/20 vision or better, with patient satisfaction rates above 95 percent across large clinical populations. [Source: American Refractive Surgery Council.] For Bryn, the impact landed eight hours after her procedure, in a quiet kitchen in the middle of the night.
“I went into the kitchen and turned on the lights and just looked,” she said. “I could read the labels on their Trader Joe’s snacks, see the street lamps outside, and everything in between. I started to cry with excitement. And then I used my drops as directed, of course.”
She slept well that night. She said she knew that if anything happened or she felt worried, she could call her surgeon. “I slept like a baby after the procedure knowing if anything happened, I could call and my team would help.”
What she tells nervous LASIK patients now.
Bryn doesn’t deny there are a few difficult LASIK stories circulating online. Bryn gets questions on them from patients sitting in her pre-surgical chair. Her response is grounded in what she has seen clinically and experienced personally.
“Most of those people were not very good candidates to begin with,” she said. “At Carrot we are VERY selective with who qualifies for surgery. We send people away to ensure we do not cause any problems post-surgery.”
She also shares the practical details that don’t make it into most online descriptions of the LASIK patient experience. Put your artificial tears in the fridge. Show up with a hair tie and comfortable clothes. And the procedure is faster than you expect.
“It’s quicker than you think — just do it,” she said.
Five months out, she still reaches for glasses that aren’t there.
“I still push up my frames that aren’t there,” she said. She mentioned the Arizona sunsets. She mentioned reading shampoo bottles in the shower. She mentioned putting on mascara without contorting toward a mirror.
“Waking up with the gift of sight every morning is a luxury and not something I take lightly.”
If you’re trying to understand what it is actually like to be a LASIK patient in Mesa, AZ, the best next step is a conversation with the Carrot LASIK & Eye Center team. Schedule online or via phone at 480-561-6000.
Carrot LASIK & Eye Center | 1500 S. Dobson Rd., Suite 313, Mesa, AZ | 480-561-6000 | Mon–Thu 8AM–4PM, Fri 7AM–4PM
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