After ICL surgery you can expect many things. Having vision unburdened by glasses or contact lenses is the biggest change after ICL. That’s an amazing benefit of ICL (and of course the reason you get ICL in the first place). But can everything about Icl be so good? There has to be a dark side to this vision correction surgery. What are the side effects you must put up with to have this great benefit?
The main side effect that people notice after ICL is a short-term halo around lights at night-time
Only a portion of the ICL actually corrects vision. Similar to how a contact lens works, the very center circle of the ICL is the part that actually has prescription (called the optical zone). The rest of the ICL simply serves as support to keep the ICL in place behind the iris (the colored-part of the eye). The part which corrects vision is very large, but there can be times when the iris dilates past this part. When this happens, light can pass not only through the ICL optical zone but also around the zone. This causes a halo around light. Light that passes around the ICL optical zone isn't in focus and instead creates a blur of light in the shape of a halo.
This effect isn’t unique to ICL lenses. Because contact lenses are built in a similar way, people frequently notice halos when first using contact lenses. Gradually over time, however, these halos diminish. What we see actually is determined by our brain processing our vision. The brain has a remarkable ability to process out unnecessary information. This extra halo effect is lumped into the category of unnecessary information. This means that gradually over time, this halo effect diminishes. It’s not a quick process, however, it can take a few months for this effect to fully diminish.
Despite the quick recovery of ICL, you can notice a little bit of dryness or foreign body sensation in the first few weeks after ICL
This dryness is caused by a few different factors. To place the ICL within the eye, a tiny little incision is placed right at the very edge of the eye through the cornea. Within the cornea are tiny little nerves. If these nerves notice that the cornea is more dry, these nerves send signals to the tear gland to produce tears. The tiny incision with ICL surgery breaks the connection of a small amount of these nerves. These nerves grow back, but while waiting for the process, there can be little bit more dry eye.
In addition, the incision itself can create a slight irregularity on the surface of the cornea. The eyelid fits over the cornea like a glove. If the eyelids feels something is out of place, you can notice a small difference.
Lastly, after Icl surgery, you will be on steroid and antibiotic eye drops for a short time. To keep these eye drops from going bad, there are preservatives in the bottles. These preservatives can also slightly irritate the eye (but the value of the eye drop greatly outweighs this mild irritation).
The combination of these three factors allows for a slight amount of dryness or irritation in the first few weeks after Icl surgery. But these are all very short-lived effects. Some people don’t even really notice it while some may be a little bit more sensitive. As the corneal nerves regenerate, as the incision smooths over and as you get off of your eye drops, your eye returns to normal in short order.
There really isn’t any other side effects to mention with ICL. The procedure and the recovery are pretty straightforward. So after the dryness fades and the halos diminish, you just have to remaining effect of really good vision.
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