PRK

My mom always told me that I should look into laser surgery to correct my vision but I always said it scared me way too much to consider it.  I don't think my opinion actually ever changed, but I suddenly found myself getting a referral from my eye Dr., met with the surgeon, and had the surgery scheduled.  If you are like me, then you figure all vision corrective surgery is called LASIK.  You, like me, would be wrong.  Apparently there are three criteria that make one a good candidate for LASIK.  I was missing two of them, but the surgeon told me I was a good candidate for PRK.  It has a longer recovery but it's cheaper and has slightly better results than LASIK.  All of a sudden I was in the waiting room for my surgery.  They gave me Valium: the magic drug.  One problem, it didn't work!  My friend was with me and we had a very coherent conversation for 45 minutes and nothing happened.  They took me into surgery and I was freaking out.  They had to remind me to breath.  I'm pretty sure that Valium was supposed to take care of those things.  I almost asked for two more pills the next day so that I could make up for my lost Valium experience.

The surgery itself was the most bizarre experience I have ever had.  It lasted no longer than 10 minutes, and I didn't feel a thing thanks to the numbing drops they put in my eyes.  They had me stare at the red light then a bright ring of light came on.  He put a cylinder thing on my eye, filled it with fluid, and pulled something (the top layer of my cornea, also known as the epithelium) out and flushed my eye.  Don't worry, they put pads on the side of my face to catch all the water so my hair didn't get wet.  Then he squeegeed my eye and told me to look at the red light while the laser made clicking noises and it smelled like burnt hair.  He then put a clear bandage (like a contact) on my eye and started on the other eye.  That was pretty much the whole thing.  Fortunately, I was still able to watch the BYU football game that night.  A day and a half later I was questioning my sanity, but fortunately the pain was gone by the third day.

I still can't believe I did that, but I'm very excited to see what it's like to no longer be dependent on glasses or contacts.  My corneas are still growing back, and the healing process takes some time so my vision is still pretty blurry since it's only the first week.  Modern medicine is crazy!

Sadly, I do not have any pictures from this experience (actually that was very much on purpose).