Can You Schedule a Lasik Consult and then the Procedure the Following Day?

For a thorough LASIK evaluation your eyes will be dilated with cyclopentolate at the initial consultation. The dilating effects of cyclopentolate can last for up to 24 hours and therefore may interfere with the LASIK procedure if it is planned for the following day. For this reason we typically schedule the consultation and the surgery at least 2 days apart.

Yes, this is possible. You need to discontinue any contact lens wear before the treatment. I usually recommend stopping contact lens wear 2 weeks before final testing and treatment. Speak with the doctor/office before making the trip to discuss your specifics. All the best!

It is common for us to operate on people from out of town.  In that situation we ask our patients to be out of their soft daily wear contact lenses for at least a week and extended or toric contacts for at least two weeks.  Assuming that everything looks perfect at the time of consultation, then we can perform surgery the next day.  Follow up then is one day and one week at absolute minimum in our office and then follow up can be performed by another doctor.  This is not optimal, but many patients from rural areas or outside of the U.S. much prefer surgery here.

There are some surgeons who perform surgery on the same day as the screening.  Assuming that the eye is healthy, the patient is a good candidate, and the health or refractive status of the eye will not change over the next fews days or weeks, there is no reason to believe that a delay is necessary for medical reasons.  Patients must be aware that they may not be a good candidate so they can't assume that the screening will conclude that they can have the procedure.  Contact lens wearers may require time out of there contacts.  Patients with blepharitis or other eye condition may need to be treated before surgery.  It is also wise to allow patients time to consider their decision to have LASIK surgery.  No patient should be rushed into have a surgical procedure.  LASIK has a strong record of success but can still have complications. 

You need to take your contacts out for at least a week and ideally two before you go in. They need to do an Orbscan to rule out warpage. Then you need to get dilated and reversed. Then if all tests are normal you can have surgery the next day. You should stop caffeine and alcohol and mascara three days before and start to drink a lot of water. I'd do all these things if I were you. And I had LASIK myself over a decade ago! 

Yes, you can do this, but many centers like to make sure you are a good candidate prior to setting you up for surgery appointments.  Also, there are many times when we notice things on your eye exam which require some treatment prior to surgery.  Some examples of this are dry eyes, lid crusting, corneal inflammation, contact lens warpage...   So, it is frequently recommended to have an exam for candidacy and then discuss surgical scheduling once you know you are a great candidate.  good luck! 

Yes, you can have the consultation one day and the treatment the next. There is no medical reason why this cannot be done. Make sure you leave out your contact lenses for an appropriate amount of time.

It is usually fine to have a Lasik consult one day and surgery the next day. This is frequently done for our out of town patients, who are traveling here for the procedure. There are a few things to consider, though. The first is that a proper Lasik consultation involves dilating the patients pupils and if the exam is done late in the afternoon the pupils may not be back to uniform shape by the next morning. Since the radar tracking device built into the laser is based off of pupillary centration, this might necessitate delaying the surgery another day. So, if you want to do this, I would recommend the consult early in the morning the day before surgery and the surgery late the next day. This seems to work very well for me. Remember, you need to leave your contact lenses out at least 7-10 days before surgery, so that needs to be factored in.

Other issues would revolve around the potential of finding something at the time of the consultation that would require postponing the procedure. Examples of this would be preoperative dryness or conjunctivitis. This, of course, becomes an inconvenience for you, but a necessity to get the best outcome. Lastly, is the very unlikely notion that something might be found at the time of the consultation that would make you a noncandidate. An example of this would be a corneal condition called keratoconus, which is easily picked up during the examination. So, you would have gotten yourself all psyched up to have the procedure, have it scheduled for tomorrow, then see me today and have to suffer the disappointment of hearing that you are not a candidate.

All in all, I see patients all the time in the manner you suggest, and I rarely see any trouble with this approach.