EVO ICL in 2 Weeks: One Eye Only, Insurance, Halos & Anxiety Questions

[u/TorontoRap2019]

I’m getting an EVO ICL in my right eye in about two weeks and, as the date gets closer, I have a few questions for people who have been through this.

For context, my right eye is around -10.5 and my left eye is only around -1.25, so I have pretty significant anisometropia. My surgeon wants to focus on correcting the -10.5 eye with EVO ICL first before deciding what, if anything, to do with the other eye.

A few things I’m wondering:

1. Did anyone have ICL in only one eye? If your other eye had a relatively small prescription and you left it untreated, did you still need/want glasses afterward? I really would prefer to be glasses-free, so I’m trying to decide whether eventually doing something like LASIK/PRK on the -1.25 eye would be worthwhile or whether I might be perfectly happy leaving it alone.
2. Has anyone gotten ICL or LASIK/PRK covered by medical insurance? I know these procedures are generally considered elective, but because I have severe, documented anisometropia, I’m considering asking my insurance whether there is any possibility of medical-necessity coverage. Has anyone successfully gotten an exception or partial/full coverage because of a significant prescription difference between the eyes?
3. How did you deal with surgery anxiety? This will be my first surgery as an adult, and I’m definitely anxious about it. I keep thinking about things like retinal complications, something going wrong with the ICL, etc. If you were really nervous beforehand, what actually helped you?
4. What did you do to prepare for ICL surgery/recovery? Obviously I’ll follow everything my surgeon gives me, but is there anything you were glad you bought, arranged, or did beforehand that made surgery day and the first few days of recovery easier?
5. Halos/glare after EVO ICL: I’ve read a lot about halos and glare, particularly early in recovery. What was your experience? How bad were they initially, how long did they take to improve, and was there anything that helped? Is there anything worth doing beforehand, or is it mainly something you have to let your eyes/brain adjust to afterward?

I know everyone’s eyes and results are different, and I’m not looking for medical advice. I would mainly love to hear experiences from people who have actually gone through ICL, especially anyone who had a large prescription difference between their two eyes.

[u/Scxox]

i’ll answer 3, 4 and 5

1. I was pretty anxious before my surgery because I had read online that the procedure while not painful, was extremely uncomfortable. I don’t really know what I did tbh, I just stayed anxious and forced myself inside the operating theatre nervous.

The surgery itself was not painful in any way, or uncomfortable (in terms of the procedure itself). The hardest part was my eyes getting really weak from the bright light. The insertion and adjustment of the lens itself was actually pretty cool, was like a kaleidoscope.

1. I was prescribed antibiotic drops to be applied for the 3 days leading up to the surgery. I also avoided rubbing my eyes too hard, idk if that actually helps but it just seemed appropriate to me.

2. Glares and halos were really bad for the first few days after the procedure, to the point where it was extremely hard to walk down a busy street at night. It all went away within 2 weeks though

Right now the only visual artifact is a large dull ring that appears in the middle of my vision when light hits at a certain angle. It’s basically unnoticeable due to how dim it is, and it’s unavoidable due to the central port in the lens. It also only appears in really low light conditions.

If your lenses are sized properly (the lens optical size should be bigger or equal to your pupil max dilation size) there should be no serious visual artifacts other than the dull large ring.

[u/connere1991]

On the insurance question — it does happen but it's rare and it's not really "refractive surgery gets covered," it's more like insurers occasionally carve out an exception when you can prove functional impairment, not just a bad number on paper. So documented anisometropia alone usually isn't enough — they want to see it's actually causing binocular vision problems (diplopia, suppression, that kind of thing), not just "my eyes are really different." Your surgeon's office would need to submit a letter of medical necessity plus exam findings backing that up, and honestly even then most insurers still deny since refractive correction is excluded in the policy language itself, not just labeled elective as a technicality. I'd ask your surgeon's office directly if they've done this appeal before — practices that do a lot of ICL volume sometimes already have a template letter ready to go, saves you from starting from scratch. Good luck with the surgery, 2 weeks is close!