I'll Keep An Eye Out For You

It was something I had considered numerous times, but I always dismissed it fairly quickly. 

Why would I want to spend several thousands of dollars on risking a surgery when I could have the same thing by pushing some contacts into my eyes every morning with no risk?

Listening to the details of having some laser slice into your cornea versus throwing on my Coke bottle type glasses that I had been wearing for more than 30 years left me feeling a bit icky whenever anyone I knew talked about how wonderfully they could see.

Years went by.  Technology improved. More nearsightedness was sliced into non-existence.

I got older.

And so did my eyes.  

I began wearing glasses in the 5th grade.  My first pair were the ugly cat's eye type.  But I was amazed at how clear everything was.  It was odd that words on the board and leaves on the trees were so......crisp.

Over the years my eyes grew weaker and weaker.  By 2006, my contacts were -9 and -8.  In clear sightedness terms that means I was practically blind without my glasses.  When I was 20 and we had a fire in my parents house, I actually ran back into my bedroom to get my glasses because I couldn't see enough to move around the house.

When my best friend had her eyes done several years ago, I was more intrigued than ever.  I swayed back and forth.  I weighed and assessed every option.  Even to the point of thinking that having my eyes work all on their own would be taxing, straining even.  I thought about the short periods of time I would not have contacts or glasses and think about how the fog of extreme nearsightedness was somehow comforting.

I know that probably sounds odd, but being nearly blind was also a security blanket.  Except for those times when I might have stepped out of the shower or gotten up out of bed and forgotten where I put my glasses.  At those times I would realize what an incredible handicap my eyesight was.   I could walk my way around the room, but I would have to feel along the counter or nightstand hoping my hands would touch the glasses so that the world could become focused again.

When I made the appointment for the consultation I asked Bob to go with me.  Normally I would never do that, I'm a big girl, I don't have to have my husband escort me to and fro.  But even making the appointment I was nervous.

The doc explained all the risks.  The odds of something going wrong are so incredibly low.  They have been performing Lasik hundreds of thousands of times (I'm assuming).  In all the years of knowing people who had had the procedure, I had only heard glowing reviews.

But listening to the risks was a bit more upsetting than I expected.  One of the risks was that the micro-flap they slice into your cornea not be complete, even though it's precisionally calculated by a machine.  If that was the case, they lower the flap and do not perform the procedure.  Bob asked him if they would go ahead and do the other eye if that was the case.  The doc explained that my eyes were so poor that he would not perform the procedure on one eye because the difference in sight would create a significant issue with my eyesight.

On the way home, my mind is screaming at me, "Just WHY are you considering this move when you can see perfectly with your contacts or glasses?"  Well, I had been needing to don a pair of cheap reading glasses in the past few years since my contacts were so strong and my eyes were getting so old.  But with plopping a pair of contacts in my eyes, there was virtually nothing I could not see far away

While I was pondering that question, Bob asked, "WHY do you want to do this again?"  It was a hard question to answer.

But I booked the appointment.

And one February morning in 2006, I gathered up my courage and walked into the Doctor's office to have my eyes sliced and lasered. 

My nerves were on high alert.  I longed for a doc who would have given me some mild sedative prior to the procedure, but that was not to be.

The procedure is performed in a reclining chair and I can't recall if there is something that might strap your head down to keep from moving.  I don't remember that, but it seems logical.

To ensure your eyes do not move, they drop some numbing drops and then have a circular suction ring literally lift your eyeball just slightly up from it's normal comfortable sitting position inside your eye socket.

Get the drift?

No?   Well, here's what it looks like.

That is the most uncomfortable part of the entire surgery.  It feels like your eye is gonna just pop right out.  This image doesn't accurately reflect the feeling of that ring lifting up your eyeball. 

Anyhow.

The doc lifts up my right eye.  The one with the worst vision.  One eye had horrible vision and the other was worse than horrible.  As he narratives the entire process, he begins to pull up the worse than horrible one.  The microkeratome then hovers over practicing the flap slice.  Doc thinks it looks good, and lowers the microkeratome to make the flap.  There was no real feeling, other than being a bit creeped out knowing it was slicing into my cornea (I'll be damned if I almost typed Corona. ;)  The doc then takes a light version of plastic tonges and lifts the flap.  The laser then comes over and precisely singes the cornea according to the pre-programmed prescription.

Down the flap goes and we move on.

Now comes the eye gouger.  Ooops, I mean that thingy up above that sucks up your eyeball.  The microkeratome again does a hover over the eye it's about to perform some micro-thin slice of cornea for the flap. 

Practice hover looks good, lower and slice into my left cornea.   At least I thought it sliced.  But for some reason the Doc reaches over and does a hover with the slice-o-matic over my left eye again. 

Then in the same tone of voice I hear him say, "The flap is not complete.  We'll have to do this later." 

Dead silence.

I think it was the tone of his voice that threw me off.  What?

After 10 seconds or so, he repeats, "We'll have to do this later, the flap did not cut completely."  This time the tone of his voice was different.

It had a tone of........dare I say it.....PITY.  With maybe a bit of regret/guilt thrown in.  The tone of his voice was what I grasped far greater than his words.

I remember laying there, with my eye still sucked up into that nasty eye-sucking equipment and thinking what I was hearing was not what he was saying.  I was trying to stay calm and NOT allowing myself any thought about how I might have just made the biggest mistake of my entire life.

I said very slowly, "WHAT does L.A.T.E.R mean?"  I was somehow trying to convince myself he was talking about 30 minutes, an hour, something OTHER than LATER.

He said, "About three months."

Looking back, I can tell you what I felt was probably shock.  I just took a pair of perfectly good eyeballs, sliced them both, singed the hell out of one and left the other in it's near-blinded state.

While I'm still trying to process his words, he steps on the pedal to push the reclining chair upright.  The nurse comes in, she missed all the excitement and he more or less repeats what just happened. His voice,  again was dripping with regret. 

The nurse made some sound that one makes when they hear bad news and have nothing they could possibly add to make things better.

If I had been in a better frame of mind I would have yelled at them to STOP with the pity tone.  That was so hard to hear.  And, of course I couldn't see much.  The correct eye would have a normal blurry vision for a day or so, the uncorrected one would normally be legally blind and now had some half-assed sliced flap.

They led me out of the operating room across the hall to the exam room.  I hear them call Bob into the room.

Bob's voice was light and had his normal "about to make a joke" tone.  As soon as he sits, the doc explains what happened.  Again he uses the horrible pity tone.  While I understood the doctor's regret, the tone reminded me of how the nurses talked to us after they diagnosed my dad with liver cancer.  I wanted to just run away from "needing" pity.   The doc explained that microkeratome had performed a perfect practice slice but yet did not fully open the flap when it cut.  That was why he moved the machine back over my left eye again to see if the machine was set correctly.  It had been, but it just "blinked" on the actual slice and left a half-flapped flap.

I could barely see across the room to Bob, but he just simply said, "Ohhhh." after the doc told him what happened.  The sound of that "Ohh" was like another slap in the face.  It was another sound that made me think I had just ruined my sight forever.

After the doctor explained that after the slice of the flap would heal, they could perform PRK (on top of the cornea, not under a flap) in about three months, the nurse walked me and Bob out of the office.  She said, "I'm so sorry." as we were leaving.  I was more than shocked that she "allowed" herself to say that. 

From the doctor and nurse's reactions I could tell it was very rare that things went wrong on Lasik.  I was just one of the lucky ones. 

We drove home in near silence.  I knew that I could not see out of my left eye uncorrected at all.  They had explained that I could not insert a contact into that eye for a couple of weeks.  I had a "correct" right eye which was actually only corrected to about 20/300 because it had had such poor vision prior to Lasik.  I went home to rest (recommended even IF things had been perfect) and Bob took my cell phone with him and called my family.  I didn't want to even imagine what was going through their minds. 

Without a contact in my left eye and 20/300 vision in my right, I would not be able to drive until my left eye was partially healed. 

I attempted to use my old Coke bottle glasses with the right lens pushed out to see if I could drive, but the difference in vision and the distance of the left lens made the whole world swirl around as soon as I would move. 

Bob drove me to work the next week and when I was finally able to put a contact lens into my left eye I was able to drive. 

But I couldn't SEE.  Yes, I could see enough to drive, but judging distances was horrible and the lack of perfect vision in my right eye left clear vision something I had taken for granted.

During that time, I realized that communication is not just about hearing what people say, but about what their face is doing, where their eyes are looking.  During those three months, I found myself becoming so incredibly withdrawn at work. 

Since I could not tell who I was meeting in the hall until they got close and even then I could not tell IF they were looking my direction, I just became silent.  I rarely talked to anyone, including my friends at work.  I loved trading jabs with my co-workers, but I realized that I had relied on that entire communication skill by seeing the reaction on my friends' faces.  Without that clue, I became a recluse.

Three months later, I was again strapped into that chair of hell and they lifted the right eye flap to do a bit of correction on it and they then performed the melting PRK on the left cornea.  By the next day I had vision that worked, uncorrected.  Something I had not experienced since third grade or so.  The nurse told me later that the only other problem they had ever seen in hundreds of Lasik surgery was with the wife of a prominent Indianapolis attorney.  She never said whether they sued.  The risks were graphically detailed before I ever signed on the dotted line and I read enough to know that some doctors would have just gone ahead and performed the Lasik on the BACK of the cornea flap and would have permanently impaired my vision.

Because my left eye was corrected only once, the vision far away was not perfect, but I could read without any aid.  For the last several years I used my right eye mainly for distances and my left eye for reading.  Only at dusk was it difficult for me to see out of my left eye.

A couple months ago I finally bought myself a pair of prescription glasses.  Since it's been a few years, reading was becoming difficult and the glasses help my left eye with distances.

But instead of wearing Coke bottles, I now have a pretty pair of glasses, thin lenses with hidden trifocals.  And I don't HAVE to wear them.  Not like before, when I was wrapped into a fogged cocoon of nearsightedness without glasses or contacts. 




Yeah, that IS the right lens of my old glasses.  And this was after technology allowed the lens to be "thin".  And the picture at the top of the page is my right eye after the first surgery.  The bruising is normal after being attacked by the great eye-sucker machine.


Would I do it all over again?  I'm not sure I can answer that even now.  Those three months of feeling like I had just f'd up my vision is still hard to forget.  And the lack of being me, communicating normally with friends and family was something that stays with me.

But it feels so weird even now to have good vision without aid.  And when I put on my new cool tiny glasses, I don't feel like a nerd, I feel like I'm one of those hip chicks on TV that wear glasses to look good.

OK, maybe not QUITE that like that, but a girl can dream.