New Eyes

I haven't posted in ages... I could say it's because I had eye surgery, except everyone probably knows that the recovery time from "Lasix" is only about two hours. Yes... Last Friday, I did it. Or, rather, had it done to me. (I just lay there.) When people ask me why I did it, I like to tell them it was because my mother pressured me to. But honestly, I'm not sure why. I had finally gotten used to the feeling of glasses on my face (after two decades), and I had the kind of contacts you don't even have to clean. So why get surgery? When I first looked into it, I was learning to surf, and salt water and contacts just don't mix. Plus it's really hard to fight your way up out of the washing-machine of a missed wave when you can't open your eyes to find out which way is up! So eventually I started surfing without glasses or contacts, which is not good either, for many reasons. For one thing, I couldn't make out the shape of a wave well enough to gauge when and where it would break; for another, I felt like pretty easy prey for a shark! (No, not really: as everyone knows, shark attacks are rare, but it's funny how much more afraid you are of something that isn't there when you can't verify by looking around that, no, there really aren't any sharks circling around you.) So I guess it was the surfing experience that made me want to get the surgery. Whatever my motivations were, it's done now, and I'll never wear my glasses again--my beautiful, beloved glasses. I feel like a limb has been amputated. Really it's just a shaving of cornea.

You want to hear about the surgery? Warning: if you are considering lasik yourself, stop reading now! The first thing you notice (after realizing that the valium doesn't seem to have affected you at all) are the nurses' funny hair nets. They're colorful kittens tumbling all over each other. Is this supposed to put you at ease, make this feel less like a medical procedure, you wonder? After you lie down, a stuffed puppy-dog is placed on your stomach. Put your hands on Mazie, a nurse says kindly. And that's where they stay, she adds, in a markedly less kindly, more directive sort of way. This is your first clue that you're in for a bit more than you expected. Everything happens fast: the nurses recite numbers to the surgeon, who moves around on the edge of your peripheral vision, looming over you every few seconds to drop some liquid in your eyes or shine some sort of light on you or swab your eyelid with something sticky. She's telling you everything she's doing, of course, but you're not really listening, because the rising anxiety is making your ears ring. You notice that the valium has indeed done something, since your brain is sending your body the panic message, but your body just lies there. Your brain says, shake! Your hands say, what a soft puppy-dog. Then all of a sudden you're in "A Clockwork Orange": there's a clamp prying your eyelids open, and you feel more vulnerable than you've ever felt before. Your brain says, blink! Your eye says, oh my god I can't I can't. (Just imagine not being able to blink--something so elemental and habitual. It's intense.) So then a machine descends on your clamped-open eyeball, and you hear a whirring noise, and you realize with another jolt of panic that this machine is making a circular incision on your eye. You can't feel this, nor can you see it, because the pressure has caused your vision to blacken completely. You just know. In only a few seconds it's over. At least, you think it's over, because you can see again. But then the surgeon lifts the flap that's just been carved out of your eye with some instrument you can vaguely make out the shape of; it opens just like a little window. What you see through the open window is nothing but different variations of light. You can't even make out the shape of the big machine above you, but you can still see the blinking green light you're supposed to focus on, even though now it's more like a glowing blob than a point of light. You hear another mechanized sound, and smell a funny smell. It smells like when your cat burns his whiskers on a lit candle. It smells like... oh my god, panic, panic, it smells like burning flesh! The laser is, after all, burning away at your cornea. And just as the horror of this realization descends (your brain cries, no!; your soul agrees), the clicking sound stops, the green light disappears, and the surgeon closes the flap. A couple of swabs over your eyeball with something cottony-looking, and the clamp is off; you're free to blink. Oh my God, you think. Now the other eye!