No, they still have to cut a flap off. The difference is that cut is now made with lasers instead of a small scalpel. But they still make a cut, pull a flap off, laser blast your eye, clean it up and put some sort of adhesive, and put the flap back. I'd agree that the period where you don't have the flap on your eye and you're damn near blind is definitely disconcerting. As it is when you can smell burning flesh.
Yeah, I can't really compare. Mine was laser cut. And it was weird as fuck because you can literally see them peeling it off and then your vision goes super blurry. It's made even more disconcerting by the fact that you're told to stare as closely as possible at a light point while the lasering happens, and all you are thinking is that you're blind and can barely see the fucking light, how do you know you're looking at it closely enough?
My wife was legally blind before corrective surgery. She went with ICL because the doctor who did a whole side of her family said she wasn't a good candidate. Because of how bad her vision was, the amount of material that needed to be removed greatly increases the chance of some really shitty side effects. Her contact prescription was -9.4 and -9.6 iirc.
I was off work for a week following my lasik (instead I "worked" in an office).
