About 7 years ago I had the lasik revolutionary eye treatment up in London. Beforehand, I went through all the preliminaries and was considered a good candidate. I was long-sighted with astigamatism in left eye. Initially it was wonderful, but over time I found I had to get reading and driving glasses again. Last diagnosis at eye doctor was early cataracts (runs in family)
I don't think I want to fool around with my eyesight again, but was extremely disappointed with the high cost of this procedure and then ending up with glasses again. People have told me that it works infinitely better with near sighted people. Did anyone else experience this problem?
The fact that initially your vision was "wonderful" suggests that there was nothing wrong with the surgery itself, the issue is merely that it doesn't prevent other eye issues that can arise over time.
Cataracts can alter your prescription in unpredictable ways, sometimes making you noticeably more nearsigthed or farsighted. Often they take serveral years to become a problem (in rare cases like mine it was months), but can alter the prescription even before they reduce your visual acuity. In my case my cataract intiially added a few diopters of astigmatism, later it switched to being several diopters of farsighted (also an early cataract, diagnosed at age 49 as being operable already but I put it off 2.5 years since my other eye didn't have a problem). Laser surgery can't prevent that, so that may well be the issue.
Also regular laser surgery only corrects your eyes for distance, it doesn't impact the issue of presbyopia, the loss of ability to focus near, which is what leads people to need reading glasses as they get older. There are some new laser approaches to treating presbyopia, but if you'd gotten one of those you'd have been aware of it and presumably would have mentioned it. Presbyopia also increases over time, if correcting your farsightedness initially helped provide enough near vision to read without glasses, that would have faded as you lost accommodation (the ability to focus near) as you got older.
Eventually cataracts do need to be treated, but how soon depends on how much they impact your vision. The advantage of waiting is that the replacement lens options improve all the time, as does the technology for the surgery itself (e.g. there is debate now whether lasers are useful for cataract surgery or merely just different, but they will likely improve to where they are demonstrably better). On the other hand, cataract surgery can leave you again with good distance vision without the need for glasses to drive, and potentially remove or reduce the need for reading glasses (if you get monovision, or a premium lens).
If your cataracts aren't too bad yet and if you can tolerate even temporarily trying contact lenses, you can test out some things that will help you decide what sort of surgery to have later. You might ask your doctor to try out monovision (one eye set to focus at distance, one eye set to focus near) with contact lenses, or to try multifocal contact lenses (which let both eye's see near&far, but which may reduce vision in low light a bit). Multifocal contacts aren't exactly the same as a multifocal IOL, but if you like them then a multifocal IOL might be an option. Now there are also extended depth of focus IOLs like the Symfony (which is what I got) but there aren't yet contact lenses that are similar to try.
oops, can't edit to fix a trivial typo. I meant my cataract made me several diopters more nearsighted, from -9 or so to -19 or so in that eye before surgery.
Thanks for your reply software. You certainly put it into perspective. My eyes weren't so bad in the beginning. I was just vain and didn't want to wear glasses any longer.
I DO have early cataracts, but it doesn't bother me to the extent of having the eyes done yet. My mother had them done around 62, and afterwards could see beautifully (especially the dust in the house)
And thanks for that bit about contact lenses - I will check that out. You've been a major help!