I Can See Clearly Now…From Lasik

LASIK HAS ALWAYS BEEN SOMETHING I’VE WANTED. I’ve worn contacts since I was in the beginning of eighth grade. So eight years ago.

EIGHT YEARS AGO.

Moment of silence please for my first, “I’m getting old” moment.

Thank you.

I finally looked into getting lasik last December. After staring into all these funky, high-tech machines they decided I was a good candidate and we set a date to get it done – January 28th. I was excited, and nervous as all get up. I mean, dude, it’s a laser. A beam of light, cutting into my eye, magically fixing it with all it’s beam of lightness and I have get to stay awake for the entire thing.

Let’s do this.

First I had to get my eyes dilated. They have to do that to enlarge my pupils to make sure there is still a brain in there making conscious decisions – or something. But getting your eyes dilated also means you wind up with super crazy Night Vision/Cat Eyes so you have to wear special shades all day.

The kind that come with a complimentary unibrow.

And kind of cool dark eyes.

You don’t think those photos are impressive until I tell you that I couldn’t actually see the camera. And my eyes stayed dilated for two days.

Night Vision/Cat Eyes have their trade-offs I suppose.

Surgery day came and Kevin went with me to document the event and be my chauffeur home. I was pretty excited.

They gave me a personalized name tag! (When are they ever non-personalized?)

And someone came in and scrubbed my eyes for me and gave me this fantastic bonnet.

They gave me a sedative and waited patiently for me to pipe down and shut up. Then the doctor came in, talked about how I’d see bubbles during the surgery – this appealed to me greatly – talked a little bit more about random things – something about a suction? Yea that’ll be important later – and then told me we’re good to go back to surgery.

Now. Here is where I type in bold.

IF YOU DO NOT LIKE CREEPY PHOTOS OF EYEBALLS THAT WILL MAKE YOUR EYES HURT, STOP HERE, CHECK BACK IN A FEW DAYS FOR A POST ABOUT DOGS OR SOMETHING. THE FOLLOWING PHOTOS DEPICT MY EYE SURGERY AND SUBSEQUENT BLOODSHOT EYES AND ARE NOT FOR WUSSES. BASICALLY IF YOU’VE NEVER SEEN AN EPISODE OF DR. G, GREY’S ANATOMY, OR ANY OTHER CREEPTASTIC HEALTH RELATED SHOW, LEAVE.

And make sure you come back on happier post days.

You’ve been warned.

Kevin was led to a two seat alcove where he could watch the entire surgery from a screen, while I was led back to a freezing room full of nice lady assistants. They gave me a blanket and a squishy star shaped stress toy. By now I could tell the sedative was working. I was still worried, but mostly just curious. They laid me down and told me they had to put the suction on my eye. Apparently the suction holds my eye in place so the laser can make a perfect flap. Then they flip this flap up, and shoot a different laser in my eye which corrects my vision. Then they push the flap back down and viola! Insta-eyes.

I was excited/nervous about the laser, but they kept saying stuff about this suction-thing.

Suction, shmucksion.

I’m tough as nails. I’ve had my tonsils out.

I was just wondering where the camera was. I wanted to give Kevin a big thumbs up, a look at me! I’m so tough. No big deal, I handle things like a champ type of a grin. I didn’t find out until after that the camera was in the machines they use, so the only thing he could see the entire time was my eye. MY FLINCHING, ITCHING, WATERING, FLESHY, SENSITIVE, PRECIOUS EYE BALL.

Sorry. I get a little teary when I think about my vision.

Back to the real story. They positioned the suction above my eye and lowered it on.

After an insane amount of pressure (but no pain due to numbing eye drops) they got the suction on, and well, suctioned. My vision went dark and that’s when Dr. Lady decided to say, “take the suction off”.

Um.

No.

No. No. No. You don’t do that to me and take it off. You do that and get it over with. She explained that while they had it perfect, they needed to reposition it because the machine didn’t like it.

Well you know what machine? Neither did I.

Then they decided they needed to stretch my eyelids open further, so they put a little metal device up under my eyelids and slowly pulled it open. It only looks painful. That part didn’t hurt.

The suction? Well. It sucked. A ton.

(HUZZAH that’s my second good joke of this post).

The photos below is the laser cutting the flap in my eye. The bubbles is where oxygen is getting under the flap.

Okay. Here’s my second disclaimer.

If you have a weak stomach or if you’re disturbed easily, don’t scroll further. I’m okay viewing it because I am weird…and because I know it’s my eye. If I’d have been shown this photo below prior to surgery, I probably would have yelled eff that or the mormon appropriate freak no and ran away screaming, cradling my boxes of contacts and cherishing them for life.

That’s the metal eye stretcher thingy. My eye is upside down because I’m laying down. The foggy part of my eye is the flap that’s just been created, and it’s 100% normal.

And 100% freaky.

This next photo is a little freakier, because the doctor is putting a sharp object under the flap of my eye to lift it. Looks bad, but it didn’t hurt one bit.

This is the laser locking in on my eye to fix it. My eye appears grainy because that’s how your eye looks underneath I guess.

After staring at a blinking light (the laser) for twenty seconds, they pushed the flap back down, rinsed my eyes out, stood me up, walked me out and handed me to Kevin.

“I don’t know how in the hell you just did that,” was the first thing he said to me. To be quite honest, I don’t know how I did either. All I knew is I couldn’t see worth a darn, it looked like I was looking through a foggy window pane, or a used milk cup. When before I’d dreamed about reading and blogging when I got home, my thoughts changed to sleeping or clawing my eyes out with rusted nails. They hurt.

They hurt real bad.

(Enough of the bad jokes. But my lips are chapped right now and they do hurt real bad. But I’m scared of the dark. I’ll just stick to blogging).

Now you’d hope this has a happy ending, that I’d wake up and exclaim, “I can see!!!” for the whole world to hear. And you’re right, I can see. I can see so darn good. I can see the alarm clock in the morning like I’ve always wanted, I can see cars at night. I can see Kevin when he’s sitting across the room from me, I can see everything.

Do you wanna see something?

Really?

Okay. I’ll show you.

That’s my left eye post-op.

And this is my right.

Is that a wrinkle I spy?! Just kidding. I had to tug on my cheek pretty darned hard to get that shot, since my eyes were sensitive and I still couldn’t see very well. The blood is normal, apparently the suction sucks so bad (man, does it ever) that it breaks the blood vessels on your eye.

It rocks.

It’s just too bad I didn’t do this around Halloween, those red eyes would have made the perfect zombie get-up.