Friday I went under the laser and though I was nervous (“Doc, I’m a twitcher and a blinker”). It went off very smooth. I was very, very happy. Here’s a recap:
1. Arrive at the office.
2. They remap my eyes with the Orbscan. (It looks just like something out of “The Manchurian Candidate”. Picture a chin rest with a red light and concentric black and white rings that light up when they scan your eyes.) It creates a map of your cornea.
3. They check your prescription.
4. You sit around for a while and get to watch a surgery or two. The surgery room is a three sided glass room viewable from the waiting room. I watched them cut open one cornea and had had enough.
5. You meet with the doctor a few minutes before and tell him how nervous you are and he laughs at you. (Not really, he was great in calming me down and talking me out of drugs before the surgery.)
6. They call your name and you enter the room.
7. Then you lie down on a long table that holds your head in an indentation so you don’t roll around. After you lie down the table rotates you under the “laser beam”. At this point, I reminded myself that I chose to have this surgery.
8. They cover the eye not being lased.
9. The good doctor tapes back your eyebrow and upper eyelid.
10. Eye numbing drugs are dropped on your eye.
11. “Clockwork Orange” style eyelid holders hold back your eyelids.
12. Then they put a metal ring on your eye that is a little bigger than you cornea.
13. They turn on a vacuum pump and tell you that “you’ll feel some pressure and that it will get dark”. You then feel your eye being sucked upward (no pain) and everything goes dark. I remind myself to breathe.
14. You then feel (no pain) a blade cutting around the edge of your cornea. This was a little freaky because it didn’t hurt yet you could definitely tell that something was cutting your eye.
15. The doctor (or someone in the room) laid back my corneal flap. Red and green pinpoints of light are visible. The doctor say’s focus on the red light. (This laser was the “flying spot” laser. It has a tracking beam that tracks your eye movement and then the other beam does the frying.)
16. Then the cooking starts. The laser starts click and cooking. And the second worst part, you smell your own eye cooking up, despite the fact that they have a vacuum positioned by your eye to catch the smell. And in case you are wondering what it smells like, if you’ve ever burnt salmon skin on a grill, that’s the smell.
17. The lasing goes on for a few seconds, and then it stops, the doctor folds your cornea back in place and adds some drugs on top. This whole process was about 60 seconds max.
18. After that he did my other eye, and then complemented me on what a good job I did, which I thought was pretty humorous since he was the artisan and I was the person that had to remind myself to breathe continually.
19. Then you sit up, things are a little hazy (due to the anti-inflammatory drug) but you can see the clock on the wall.
20. They then send you to a post-op room and check out their handiwork.
21. I dropped off my glasses.
22. They gave me two valium and I was driven home, by my lovely wife.
23. Napped for four hours and when I woke up it was amazing. I could see just fine for the first time in 20+ years.
The day after I went in for my post-op check up and my vision was somewhere between 20/15 and 20/10! Final thoughts, pretty f’ing fantastic!