I recently got SMILE done at 大學眼科 in Hsinchu and wanted to share my experience in case anyone else was considering it in Taiwan.
My vision has always been pretty bad, and I’ve worn contact lenses daily since I was about 10 years old (and have hardly ever worn glasses my entire life). My latest prescription that’s been stable for around the last 5 years (I’m 30 now) was -7.0x-0.25 in my left eye, and -4.75x-0.75 in my right eye.
My wife helped me set a preliminarily checkup a week in advance, during which time I have to wear glasses to let my cornea reset back to its natural shape.
At the appointment they ran me through a battery of machines and tests measuring all sorts of stuff – most of them not bad, with the “dry eye” test being the most unpleasant (they put a stinging drop in your eye and then you have to put strips of paper in your eye to see how far the tears go) followed by an extremely bright light one.
Afterwords, the nurse / salesperson went over the results with me – I had good cornea thickness (584 microns) for either SMILE or LASIK, and so opted for SMILE since it’s supposed to have less dry eye symptoms.
Note that this entire process is done in Chinese, so I’d recommend bringing a Taiwanese friend / spouse – I’d rate my Chinese as “lower intermediate” and they could dumb it down for me when asked, but there were a lot of medical words flying around that I had no clue about.
I was fairly impressed that they didn’t apply any pressure during the sale, and instead just wanted me to feel informed about the different options, risks, and prices.
- LASIK: $49,500-$125,000 (different lasers and healing times)
- SMILE: $115,000 (laser takes 23 seconds)
- SMILE Pro: $125,000 (laser takes 8 seconds)
- SMILE Pro 2.0: $135,000 (laser takes 8 seconds and computer does the positioning)
I thought that I could relax enough to not spend the extra $10,000 for 15 seconds, and so opted for SMILE.
They had a slot open for the procedure the next day (a Tuesday – Friday and Saturday fill up more in advance), and I was tired of wearing glasses and just wanted to get it over with at that point (as well as feeling comfortable with the clinic).
The next day I show up for surgery and they run me through a few of the tests again just to make sure nothing has changed. They gave me an anxiety pill, but I’m not sure what it was and didn’t really feel like it did anything.
The actual surgery has two parts to it for each eye:
- The “laser” part where you stare into a green light as your vision becomes completely foggy. The laser suctions your eyeball to it, so although they keep telling you to make sure you don’t move, I’m under the impression that you’d have to try decently hard to move it before you caused damage. Overall this part was not bad at all, and totally worth saving $10,000 for the extra 15 seconds.
- The laser cuts a cross section of your cornea out, and a little hole in the side for the doctor to remove it (instead of a flap with lasik). So they take you out of the machine and the doctor then holds your eyeball with some sort of suction tool, and goes into the little hole with tweezers to break the cross section lose and pull it out of there. All in your field of vision.
- I’ll admit that this part was not pleasant – I wouldn’t say painful, but I’d rate it similar to getting my wisdom tooth pulled out in Taiwan (awake w/ novocaine).
Dr. Hu spoke to me in a mix of Chinese and English during the surgery, with the only thing I didn’t completely understand was him telling me to “scoot over a little bit to my left” while trying to position the laser.
Walking out of there I could already see a little better than my normal non-aided vision – everything was still very foggy and 20 minutes later after the anesthetic wore off my eyes felt tired and similar to when you have a really bad eye infection or allergies (that scratchy feeling on your eye lid).
I woke up the next day, however, to perfect 20/20 vision! Eyes still a little tired, but I could see unaided for the first time in my memory!
I’m now 4 days post-op and extremely pleased with the results. My eyes feel almost completely healed, with the following side effects that are likely to fade over the coming months (but even if not I’d be happy with the results):
- Definitely larger starbursts around lights than before (I had those before the surgery as well)
- Poorer night vision than previously w/ glasses on
- Looking at something close, and then something further away takes about half a second longer than previous to “focus” correctly
Overall very pleased with the result and feel like it’s some of the best money I’ve ever spent!