20/15 Never Looked So Good

Farewell, dear glasses. You served me well, but I'm happy I no longer need you.

Most of you will know that I have had absolutely horrible vision since I was young. I mean, legally blind from grade school. I wore glasses forever; hideously large purple ones. I was so excited when I finally reached an age that my parents deemed mature enough for contacts. I think it was twelve or thirteen. No more smudgy lenses, no more fogging when I came in from out of the cold. Contacts were amazing, I loved them. But they still had their drawbacks. I was still blind when I took them out at night. I couldn't just wake up and pop them on my face like glasses, I needed a sink and a mirror, making sleepovers or camping a bit of a hassle. Driving anywhere with a window open or the top down was pretty much impossible, and there were those fun times when my contact would just randomly pop off my eye for no reason, and I'd have to gingerly crouch down on the floor to hunt it up praying I didn't accidentally step on it.

I remember hearing about  LASIK sometime in my teens, and thinking how amazing it sounded. I knew it would be a long time before I could afford it, and I figured the procedures would be nice and perfected by then. Fast forward many more years, and I'm an adult who has begun to feel irritated with my contacts. I have four kids who love to take turns waking me up in the middle of the night for leg cramps, or bad dreams, or potty breaks, etc., and the glasses fumbling had grown to be a real annoyance. Not to mention, I couldn't ever read the clock to know what time it was in the middle of the night, despite the fact that it projects the time in huge numbers on our ceiling.

My old dream of LASIK resurfaced with a vengeance. So after a little research, I found out that Moran Eye Center was conducting a study for LASIK patients that involved very little but gave you a $2000 discount on the procedure! I called that very day, and was instructed to stop wearing my contacts immediately. Two weeks later, I had my first appointment where they verified that I was, in fact, a candidate for LASIK as long as my vision didn't get any worse in the next three weeks. When I went back three weeks later, my vision had actually improved. Odd to say the least. So they wanted to see me a third time a few weeks later to make sure that my eye had stabilized. When I went in for that appointment, my eye was closer to its original correction, and the doctor said we had enough info to proceed. My LASIK appointment was scheduled for two days later, April 18th.

Despite the fact that they told me the whole appointment would only last 2 hours at a maximum, I ended up waiting for over an hour an a half just to be seen. When they finally called my name, the nurse had me put on this lovely paper hairnet, and cleaned my eyes with iodine.

That's attractive!

Shortly thereafter, they were ready for me in the room with all the lasers. I laid down under one machine whose sole purpose was to inject little gas bubbles under the surface of your eye to create a flap. In order to do this, they have to stick a suction cup on your eye for the machine to dock with. Suffice it to say I felt like my eye was being slowly shoved to the back of my brain. It was an unpleasant experience that I had to turn around and repeat on the second eye. My vision actually went completely out for this, by the way. Seriously freaky, but at least they'd warned me of that possibility. When they were done, I sat up, and it looked as though I were looking through skim milk. They led me to the second machine where they inserted a specula to keep me from blinking. The doctor loosened the flap, flipped it back over, and the laser began tracking my eye movement while I stared at a flashing green light.

Now I'll just tell you right now, that the laser itself doesn't hurt, but it's so bright on your now-very-light-sensitive eyes that it felt painful at times. It also smelled like burning hair, which again, they'd warned me about. It only took 22 seconds of treatment on my right eye, and 23 seconds on the other. That's like $50 a second.

When it was finished, the doctor replaced the flaps, and made sure they were laying nicely. My eyes were still quite blurry, but the numbing drops kept them from hurting for the moment. A nurse taped some sweet plastic shields over each eye, than gave me some even sweeter giant black granny glasses to protect me on the ride home. At this point, I was starting to feel pretty nauseous and had a nasty headache. The car ride home, with all the twists and turns and steep hills, felt endless. Once we got there, I went straight to my bed and laid down, ready to relax and let the healing begin. I was supposed to keep the eye shields on for the rest of the day, but the tape was making me crazy.

Racquetball anyone?

When the numbing drops finally wore off, my eyes did burn quite a bit. I had a hard time even opening them, and Teag had to help me apply my prescription drops for the rest of the day. The next morning however, I could see amazingly well! I still had a bit of haloing, but that supposed to be gone in a week or two. At my two subsequent follow ups, I've been seeing 20/15 out of both eyes!

My older kids were a little freaked out by the whole thing, and seemed to expect that I would emerge looking horribly  disfigured or something. The only evidence of my procedure was some large broken blood vessels on the whites of my eyes.

Even those haven't been that bad. Overall, it's been seriously amazing, and I'm so happy I was able to get this done. For me, having been SO blind for so long... this is life changing.