rfbooth.com :: thoughts :: lasik :: clarifying

Tuesday July 26th, after surgery

When we last saw our hero, he was about to get off the table after his second eye was treated. Bored with the third person already but not yet with the present tense, I sit up and am told I can open my eyes. Holy shit. This is supposed to be bad, apparently, but I'd've settled for this as a finished result. I can see, by my lights, astonishingly well, and it's improving almost by the second. By the time my companion arrives in the recovery room, I can pick out things like the cord of the kettle and the fact that the empty mains socket is switched on from the far side of the room. Before I couldn't have seen the kettle. I am almost unable to believe how well I can see already, five minutes after surgery, and while crying from sheer happiness.

I was in the operating room for less than six minutes. My life is completely different.

I see Joe again for a quick check before I go, a few minutes later and less than two hours after arriving. Everything looks good to him, and it certainly does to me. He obviously understands my emotion, and welcomes me to the world. I can sense that the blurring I have will go as the excess fluids drain out. Astonishingly, I can already, just about, read the line on the chart that's UK driving standard. I am told that many people have some stinging, streaming eyes and considerable discomfort when the anaesthetics wear off, for a couple of hours; I do not. In fact, I feel great.

I had surgery at a little after 10am. By 2pm I am back online, telling my friends it went well, focusing fairly easily on the small point size I always used with my glasses.

Wednesday July 27th

My head is sticky, from the tape that holds the eye protectors on at night, and my hair is a little greasy; washing it without getting water near my eyes is a hassle. I also have visible marks which I assume (wrongly) are where the flap was cut; these are so normal that nobody even mentions them. These are minor hassles, though, and I feel great, easily making my way by bus to my early-again followup appointment. I am quite a bit clearer than yesterday, but (unsurprisingly) not yet settled; they don't want me to drive yet, though I'm comfortably able to read that part of the chart, in case things fluctuate. I also have some slight inflammation in my left eye (so slight that I have no idea what they're talking about), which is nothing to worry about, but we up the schedule of drops. The antibiotic drops are perhaps the worst thing - the aftertaste they leave as they run through the plumbing and to the back of the throat is (as I realise after a friend mentions it) exactly like earwax. I am to return on Friday to see how it's progressing. I'm warned that my vision is astonishingly good for this early, and not to worry if it gets worse for a while over the next few days.

Friday July 29th

I have a little inflammation in both eyes, but it's clearing up well; keep up the drops, come back and see Joe on Tuesday. I've still had no discomfort other than the aftertaste and a fierce desire to rub them. Almost the worst thing is that I can't go and lift weights for the moment, lest I sweat into them. I am now reading two full lines better than Wednesday with either eye, and am cleared to drive; I'm pretty much 6/6 now. I decide, though, that I shan't write about it publicly until after I'm told the inflammation's gone. I'm not a superstitious man, but if I write about how great it was and then go blind I won't be able to go back and correct the piece.

Tuesday August 2nd

I'm back to see Joe at the end of the day, and the news is very, very good. All the inflammation has cleared up. I drove after dark last night, and there's no real problem with haloing - I already know from my experiences with contact lenses that this will go over the next few weeks as my brain adjusts to compensate. I ask Joe a lot of questions, and get detailed answers from him: most interestingly to me, they cut away about 30% of my underlying cornea, about 160 microns (a sixth of a millimetre), which is pretty much the same thickness as the corneal flap. 30% is his own personal limit, though some surgeons will do more; he says, reasonably enough, that I probably have very thick corneas for some good reason. I ask some other questions, and he says “we don't normally show this to patients, but you seem like you can cope”, and pulls up a video file in media player on the computer in the consulting room. Again, the easily disturbed among you may want to skip to the outcomes.

It's a video of the same procedure I had, on a right eye, from overhead pretty close to the laser. Joe talks me through it, all two minutes or so, from the eyelashes being taped down onwards, pointing out details like the little spots they paint on so they can line them back up when they close the flap, and know it's in exactly the right place. The pressure ring actually holds the eye still too, I think with some sort of sucker, and that's what's caused those little symmetrical patches in my eyes (apart from those, they're incredibly clear). I'd thought that the flap was cut by hand, but actually it's a little machine that circles around the edge of the ring, with a knife that apparently spins at 3,000 rpm. Later, the realisation that it's basically a scaled-down electric canopener will amuse me. The flap's bigger than I'd realised, almost three quarters of a circle by the looks of it and covering almost the entire iris. There are no surprises during the laser process; as I'd suspected, the computer guiding the laser tracks your eye's movements and adjusts for them, the instruction to fixate on a point is just to make its job easier. Finally the flap is very, very carefully smoothed back into place, taking great care to line it up, and that's about it. I feel privileged to have seen it; it's fascinating. This talk-through of basically the same process I've been through is detailed and informative, but the video was much better.

Anyway, let's get those big questions answered.