After what seemed like forever, my wife finally had Lasik surgery. She was extremely excited. She used to complain that her vision was so bad that she couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom at night without reaching for her glasses. She hated her glasses. She hated her contacts even more. So we saved and we calculated and, finally, we decided that we could afford it. So after various eye appointments and consultations and scheduling nightmares, the big day finally arrived.
They tell her that she needs someone to drive her home after the surgery. No problem, that’s me. I can do that. The appointment’s a couple of hours, I’ll take the afternoon off work and I’ll bring a book. So there we are in the waiting room after her final eye exam, waiting for her to be called back to the little operating theater where the surgery is performed. She’s obviously nervous so I’m making an effort to be a little irritating, you know, just to take her mind off things. Then the nurse comes and calls her in.
“Well, here I go,” she says.
The nurse turns to me. “Would you like to observe the procedure?” she says.
Well, there’s a thought. Its kinda creepy, the idea of watching an eyeball get sliced, but when am I ever going to get another chance to see this? Incidentally, that is exactly the same reaction I had when I was asked if I wanted to observe my newborn son’s circumcision. You’d think I’d have learned better, after that. Nope, not me. “Sure,” I say, and off we go.
So we go back into the recesses of the clinic, and the nurse starts giving my wife instructions on how to care for her eyes following the surgery, what she should and shouldn’t do afterwards, etc. She gives my wife three different kinds of drops. Two are medicated, and need to be taken four times a day for four days. The third is a brand of over the counter drops that she can use anytime she needs them. Then the nurse says “We offer patients the option of a sedative prior to the surgery, to help you stay relaxed. We use valium. Would you like to take one?”
My wife looks at me and says “Do you think I should?”
“I would, if it was me,” I reply. Actually, I’d ask for two. Or as many as they can legally give me. Or hell, just knock me out, with a mallet if necessary. I don’t like the idea of people poking at my eyeball. She took the valium.
They lead her into the operating theater and lie her down on a cushioned table. I’m standing just outside the room looking in through a big square window. There’s a big hunka machinery lurking there in the middle of the floor, the laser, with a TV monitor perched on top.
The nurse picks up a giant plush stuffed frog and sets it on my wife’s stomach. I don’t get it.
Then the doctor comes in. They swing the table with my tiny little helpless-looking wife on it under the arm of the laser. I see that the TV monitor is now centered on one of my wife’s eyes. Holy cow, it’s as big as a dinner plate.
They swab off around her eyes with some nasty-looking brown gunk, antiseptic I assume. They put a couple of different kinds of drops in her eyes. One is an antibiotic, to head off any possible infection. The other is an anesthetic. Then the doctor tapes her eyelashes up out of the way. Hmmm, that doesn’t look too bad, I think. A little uncomfortable, maybe, and then GIANT STAINLESS STEEL HOOKS COME DOWN AND RATCHET HER EYE OPEN UNTIL THE ENTIRE EYEBALL IS VISIBLE.
Now in reality I know that those hooks were about the size of bullion cubes. But my guts still insist that they were monstrously large and hideous. They repeat this procedure on the other eye.
And I notice that my wife has dug her fingernails about two inches into the plush frog. Now I get it. It’s a bite-the-bullet device.
Then the doctor picks up a little metal rectangle, about one inch by two, with a circular cutout in the middle the size of the iris. This is the knife that makes the flap. He lowers it down onto my wife’s eye, and I see the surface of it bulge upwards slightly through the cutout. Up on the monitor, the metal thing looks big enough to take off someone’s head. Stainless steel guillotine.
I see the blade slide across and back. I imagine it makes a little snik-snik sound. My wife’s whole body twitches. Another nurse has been standing beside me offering a running commentary. She mentions now that they will cut the flap on the other eye immediately, because since the cutting of the flap is the most traumatic part of the procedure, it would be harder for the patient to have to wait through the surgery on the first eye, knowing that the flap has yet to be cut on the second eye.
They shift her over and the guillotine descends again. Did I mention how tiny and helpless my wife looked? Snik-snik, and her whole body twitches again.
Oh, look. Behind me. There’s a chair. I bet I can see that monitor perfectly well from there. I kinda need to sit down. I’m not feeling too good. The play-by-play nurse looks at me, with a big smile and suspicious eyes. She thinks I’m going to faint. Well, I’ll show her. I shall will myself not to pass out. Unfortunately it doesn’t really seem to be open to debate. I’m definitely getting light-headed. The nurse brings me some ice-cold water. That helps. I look away from the monitor for a few seconds. That helps more.
When I look back they’re lasering the first eyeball. A little red light flashes on and off repeatedly. That’s not so bad. I can look at that. When they’re done, they lower the flap back down. And I could swear there’s a great big air bubble under it, right smack in the middle. And they don’t seem to be doing anything about it.
I begin to lecture myself. These people are professionals, I say. There is now way, absolutely no way, that they would be so obtuse as to not notice a giant air bubble under the surface of my wife’s eye. I am not seeing what I think I am seeing. Furthermore, I will not make a fool of myself by demanding that they open their freakin’ eyes and notice the horrible mistake they have made.
I decide to play it cool. I lean over towards the nurse (who is still watching me like a hawk in case I keel over) and casually say “What’s that thing in the middle of her eye that looks like, I dunno, an air bubble?”
She gives me a cynical little smile. I haven’t fooled her for a second. “It’s just a reflection,” she says.
They laser the other eye, and lower the other flap. The surgery is over. They wheel my wife out of the operating theater, and she gives me a bleary smile. The valium has definitely kicked in.
Afterwards they give her a big set of clear plastic goggles to wear. These work on the same principle as the cones they put around a dog’s neck after a trip to the vet. They are to prevent you from touching the eyes in any way. They tell us that she needs to wear them to bed the first night because her eyes will feel gritty and she may try to rub them in her sleep. The flaps will heal by themselves, they tell us, but it’s important not to touch them. Go home, try to take a nap. In the morning you should be able to see well enough to drive to work.
So I lead her out to the car. She is keeping her eyes closed. The goggles look cute on her, in a refugee-from-a-Flash-Gordon-reel kind of way. In the car she drops right off to sleep. Apparently they don’t calculate the sedative dosage by body mass. The valium has knocked her flat out. I figure it’s a good thing that the drive home takes a while. She’ll get some good rest in the car.
At home I put her to bed and close the curtains. She is apparently still very sleepy. I leave the room and go about the business of being very quiet. After a while I go pick up the kids from school and make dinner. I’m debating whether or not to wake her up to see if she’s hungry. I go into the bedroom to see if she’s still asleep. She isn’t. She looks up at me. I ask her if she wants anything to eat. And she starts to cry.
Now this is not a woman who cries at just anything. I’ve known her for twelve years, been married to her for ten, and in that time I can probably count on my hands the number of times I’ve seen her in tears. If she’s crying, she must be in some serious pain. I ask her what’s wrong.
“It feels like someone threw a handful if sand into my eyes, and it won’t wash out and I can’t rub them.”
So the anesthetic and the sedative have both worn off. I ask if she wants some drops. She says they just make her eyes sting. I ask if she wants the TV or radio on to pass the time. She says she just wants something to eat, so I bring in our food and we eat. I’m considering calling the clinic and asking if this is normal. After awhile she lays back down and says she wants to try to sleep some more. Eventually she drops off.
The next morning the improvement is startling. She says her eyes now feel about like they would if she’d left her contacts in overnight by mistake. A little gritty and irritated, but not anything she couldn’t deal with. And the drops help. She says she can see well enough to drive, so it’s off to work. I am skeptical about that. “You know, I could drive you if you want me to,” I say, having unpleasant thoughts about car wrecks. Nope, she’s gonna do it herself.
Her right eye looks fairly normal. The white of her left eye, though, is almost entirely blood red. Now I’m having unpleasant thoughts about embolisms. We find out later that the redness was probably the result of her involuntarily jerking her eye to the side while they lifted the flap, which broke some blood vessels. It should clear up in a couple of weeks.
She has her one-day appointment scheduled to get her eyes rechecked over lunch, and she’s gonna drive herself to that, too. They came back and told her she was a “hazy 20/20.” Perfectly normal for a one-day follow up. She has a one-week follow up as well, and at that one the news is even better. Each eye individually checks out as 20/20, and with both eyes together, squinting slightly, she can make out the 20/15 line on the chart. Better than perfect vision.
I ask her if it was worth it. She responds with an enthusiastic yes.
All I can say is, she’s a hell of a lot braver than I am.
