WVLEC Services — Photorefractive Heratectomy (PRK)
During The Procedure
To make you comfortable and the procedure pain-free, anesthetic drops will be placed in the eye you are having treated. These are repeated a few times over the period of one half hour to make sure your eye is immobile. A speculum is gently placed on your eye to ensure that your eye stays open while the surgeon performs the procedure. There is no discomfort, since the drops placed in your eye prior to the procedure will affect your eye until well after the procedure is completed.
The technology varies from clinic to clinic. Depending on the equipment, the surgeon will then place a suction ring on your eye that will hold it steady for the entire procedure. If the first technique is not used, other methods of keeping your eye still will be employed (none of them are painful) and you will be asked to stare straight up at a light in the laser machine.
Some machines actually track and follow the pupil. Rather than making cuts in the cornea, the PRK procedure uses an excimer laser to shape an area 5 to 9 millimeters in diameter on the surface of the eye. This process removes only 5-10% of the thickness of the cornea for mild to moderate myopia and up to 30% for extreme myopia - about the thickness of 1 to 3 human hairs. The major advantage of this procedure is that the integrity and the strength of the corneal dome is retained.