Another frustrating thing for me: well-intentioned people like yourself will chime in and offer advice or suggestions for things they've found highly helpful - and instead of me being able to compile/organize a list of things I've tried and their outcomes, explaining why they didn't help, why I didn't continue them, why there wasn't a net benefit, I instead get reminded that that kind of writing up a complete list is an extremely difficult task for me. I'm only replying to you this morning because I couldn't actually begin responding to you yesterday even though I saw your reply because 1) I had opened my right eye already which allowed the post LASIK eye pain and symptoms to trigger fully (central sensitization/hyperalgesia), and 2) I had begun to do some activity yesterday - namely driving a short distance to my mother's for a late lunch and then take my puppy to an off-leash dog park for an hour - that relatively small amount of movement being enough to really compound/amplify with the seemingly exponentially growing pain/sensitization from the eye pain.

Central sensitization and hyperalgesia is really a different kind of beast when it comes to pain, people including most doctors really seem to have a hard time understanding it. That added stress to my nervous system from opening my right eye and triggering/ramping up the sensitization/pain from just low activity and careful movement was enough to lock up my thinking, and arguably my emotions, but more specifically the locking/the eye pain and increased pain from movement makes fluid thinking have much more friction added to it; one good or as relatable as possible thought experiment for a "normal"/unaffected person may be to imagine the feeling when you get something in your eye and you desperately react to get it out because it's so painful: now imagine that foreign object feeling is immense because it's permanent and broad, it's "a lot of objects" in your eye(s) because your cornea and nerves were sliced across 90%+ of the cornea (and so abnormally/constantly signaling as such), and imagine how your brain/nervous system may try to cope from such an overwhelming/overriding system constantly firing to draw your full attention to what your eye is telling your body is an active/present moment object in your eye - potentially as if you just walked into a sharp object and your eye is signalling for you to literally freeze still because it thinks you're in the moment just done something to critically wound your eye and moving another millimetre or less would threaten your survival (as the evolutionary strength of the reaction has come to dictate).

Well, the answer is some people after LASIK get this severe reaction, their nervous system gets overwhelmed - arguably the more naturally sensitivity, creative, healthy, and grounded people will have stronger/more detrimental symptoms/reaction to the eye damage; central sensitization and hyperalgesia that LASIK for years completely swept under the rug as being possible and only recently admitting to being a potential "side" effect. In fact they purposefully mislabeled what should be called corneal neuralgia syndrome as "dry eye syndrome" to mislead people away from learning that the "dry eye" part is actually on a spectrum of symptoms caused by the damaged cornea/nerves that happens in 100% of their surgeries; non-LASIK done research done has shown up to 40% of people have permanent problems after LASIK, and in 2011 one of the expert FDA advisors, who votes yes to approving LASIK, published a letter to the FDA asking them to immediately recall LASIK because there was data they were ignoring that they should have never been ignoring, and that it should have never been approved in the first place. Part of the medical industrial complex where arguably regulatory and institutional capture has occurred in the name of profits.

So again, I'm writing this out first thing in the morning with my right eye shut still, my eyes having had a reduced level of pain while I slept allowing my nervous system to calm down some, along with recovering from the movement yesterday that compounds with the eye pain and worsens the mental/executive symptoms/dysfunction. There are a few tangents I know I lost track of writing above, I'm not going to be able to go back to insert them, so if what I wrote above doesn't flow well or seems to be missing something then that's why.

To answer you specifically - I've done breath work and cold showers in the past, daily to multiple times daily for weeks, and there was no net benefit and arguably it was added stress to my nervous system that's already overwhelmed from active overriding [eye] pain that can't be reduced. That same eye pain and the friction it added once I'd opened my right eye, and in part I had used a lot of mental energy already writing longer comments on HN - that mental energy otherwise goes to trying to maintain focus/distraction on anything to try to keep me from getting completely sucked in/lost to the pain, the friction that will block mental (including emotional abilities/processing), lead to that small inconsequential reminder or level of frustration triggered from a well-intentioned person offering advice - where I was too blocked, too much friction/resistance from the pain at that point that it took me at least 20 minutes of going back and forth to reading parts of what you wrote then having to leave because of frustration/irritability being triggered because of the very slight pressure/stress that was added to my already overwhelmed nervous system; I'm not sure I'm describing this well here but it's best I can do at the moment.

That's why logically, emotionally I'm already certain it's the compassionate thing to do and I'll forgive myself for not being able to handle the burden nor for being able to handle knowing the burden/consequences I'd be leaving behind, logically I'm only doing the piriformis syndrome surgery as the last thing I try - so if it doesn't have a dramatic reduction in pain and cause a noticeable reduction in my executive dysfunction (my argument or hypothesis is the eye pain, a/the major source of pain could be compounding with another potentially major source of pain [piriformis syndrome, similar to sciatica], so eye pain could be say 33%, the PS could be say 33%, and the compounding could potentially cause runaway/cascading/feedback loop pain of 33%+ - for potentially a 66%+ reduction in pain/sensitization) then I'm gone. Of course I have arguments and proof points from my prior experiences with healing injuries with stem cell treatments as to why the surgery may or may not help, so the outcome is completely uncertain if it will help enough, if my executive function will improve at all, if my quality of life can improve at all, and so the most accurate odds I can give it is a 50/50 shot.

I've also done plenty of water fasting, I did carnivore/high fat red meat only diet for 8 months - now I try to stick to just organic red meat, kale, and raspberries. I've also done many Ayahuasca ceremonies, MDMA therapeutic sessions, massage, acupuncture, etc. There are pros and cons to all of it, some I've been able to maintain because it's at least neutral - other things like acupuncture are intolerable, for example, as after sessions to clear my Wood meridian energy line [3 end points at right eye] then my body is completely calm but then the pain is completely localized at my right eye and then for the following 6-8 hours I feel an intense burning sensation at my right eye - meanwhile feeling the pain and strwss referring from my eye and building up the stress into my body until there's an equilibrium of sorts where the pain level/hypersensitivity/sensitivity level in my body matches the level of pain in my eyes.

My nervous system is very healthy, it's the pain that's overwhelming, short circulating or disrupting different processes. I can't do anything more to reduce the eye pain because the stromal stem cell treatment is up to 5 years away from being clinically available, everything being delayed due to pandemic as well, so my last hope is the piriformis syndrome surgery - for which I have no real or solid reference for how much it might be sensitizing my nervous system - all I know is "sciatica" symptoms bothered me enough 15 years ago for me to first try to investigate it, but that my nervous system could handle that pain along with vast majority of high school football related injuries that I wasn't even aware I had, and it was only after LASIK that my nervous system and therefore mind was disrupter.)