Here’s the bottom line: I’ve been through this, and I now have better than 20/20 vision. Before the surgery, twice a day I had to poke myself in the eye. Every single time I was away from home, I’d have to remember to bring contact stuff. Because of this terrific opportunity, my life is now more simple. Simple is good…
So here’s what happened > I go into the surgery place. They told me not to wear any beauty products or anything like that as it would interfere with the laser. I took a very low does valium there in the clinic to help me sleep after the procedure.
I put on the blue had, and a nice assistant gave me a little stuffed animal to hold onto. Hmmm, that’s weird, I’ll just play along. The doctor says, go ahead and lie back on the chair. “Okay Drew, what I’m going to do here is numb up your eye” I get a few drops, then he swabs my eye lid with a Q-tip. “Now what I’m going to do is put on this [thing] to keep you from blinking”
My other eye is covered up and taped shut. They do the whole procedure on each eye separately.
Have you seen Clockwork Orange? Well… I’m about to get one of those fucking things.
It’s plastic, but it’s got retainers for each eye lid, then he turns a screw to open the up even a little more. I’m totally numb, so I don’t really feel a thing.
“Okay Drew, now I’m going to make The Flap. You’re going to feel a little pressure.” He places something about the size of a champagne cork that’s plastic or something on my eye. I can see through it. “Here’s a little more pressure… and your vision is going to blank out”.
Now all this “pressure” that he’s applying feels really strange. For those of you who haven’t been awake, numbed, and operated on, it’s kinda like someone putting a 4 inch by 4 inch piece of tape on your arm/back/leg/fuckingeyeball then plucking or picking at the center of the tape. You can’t really feel the pinch, but you can feel around the pinch. The tape thing is the best way I can describe this – although, when it’s your eye, you can’t feel all that discomfort, but you can still see out of it.
This “blank out” thing is massively understated. Usually when I’m so drunk I get tunnel vision, or black out, it’s a whole body experience along with the total lack of caring what happens to myself. I’m very much awak during this procedure, I can see out of an (almost) perfectly good eye. This guy is “making a flap” on it with some sort of weird ass cork shaped thing. Picture someone pulling a big, dark cloud wall from right to left right over your eye. Is my eye open? It was open… I feel like it’s open, but I can’t see anything. This is fucking scary. Clutching the stuffed animal…. what the hell have I done? I can’t see out of my goddamn eye!!! Play it cool – the odds are on my side.
Oh good, he’s taken the cork of death off my eye and I can sorta see again. “Alright Drew, that went perfectly. I’m going to pull the flap back now.”
Again, I had a perfectly good eye. Now the reality of what’s being done to me is really hitting home. You know, at the eye doctor, how they have that spiffy half eye diagram on the wall? Well, I know that this dude has just cut off the front part of my cornea, and is about to “pull it back”. Also, the truth of how the eye works: light hits your cornea and gets bent, that passes through the pupil, gets bent again by the lens, goes through some sort of focus point, then hits the back of your eye – the retina.
The doctor pulls the flap back and I realize my eye has just had the front part of it removed. Everything is cast into a slightly elevated brightness blur. This was almost as scary as the dark cloud I spoke about above. Thankfully, the actual laser is next, which I’m surprised to find out is totally wussy compared to the first part of this procedure.
The laser is a diffused blue light which appears to be about the size of a ping-pong ball which flashes in my eye. It isn’t bright, it doesn’t hurt, and it’s almost over so I’m happy that I’ve made it through the hard part.
The doc puts the flap back and pushes it down with a weird q-tip. He tapes up the eye, covers it, and then starts in on the next eye.
So I wanted to tell you about this experience because no one told me about it in detail as I have here before I went in. I know it sounds scary, and it was scary. But now, every day I notice I can see the clock at night – I don’t have to put in my contacts, take them out, or worry about them coming out ever again while swimming. My life has been made more simple, and if given the chance, I’d get Lasik again – for sure.
Ah one last thing. There is another procedure called PRK where they change the shape of your cornea without creating a flap – there is no flap. A few words about these two procedures. I got the regular Lasik procedure where they created the flap. Here’s my analogy: you know if you get a really shitty cut on your arm – would you rather get the gouge and have the skin disappear, or have a flap hanging on there? If there was a flap there, and you stuck it back where it goes, don’t you think it will heal better and faster – rather than the whole gouge having to heal up again? Same thing here with the Lasik. The people who had PRK procedure came in the next day still wearing their sunglasses, and putting drops in their eyes every two seconds because of the discomfort. Me – I was cruising the next day. By day four, besides having to put eye drops in every four hours, it was like nothing had ever happened.
One would get PRK if they were a little older – say 40, and their cornea was not as thick as it used to be.
Let me know if you have any other questions or whatever about the procedure. Oh I went to Restore Vision Centers.