LASIK

Random fact: The title of this post is in all caps not for emphasis, but because it's actually an acronym, so it should be in all caps.
Random fact: The smell of a laser burning one's eye is very similar to the smell of a newly lit match.
Random fact: If you are wearing eye shields and then lean over your 3 month old baby to say hello, she'll likely freak out and start crying because face it, you just look weird right now.

Yesterday was a momentous day for me. In case the extrapolation hasn't finished, I'll spell it out for you: I had LASIK done yesterday. Jacob first suggested I get LASIK not long after we got married. But the idea of any blade coming near my eye gave me serious shivers down my spine, and not the good kind. He's brought up about 4 times a year since we got married and since our third anniversary is in a few days, you can tell that it was becoming time to either do it, or get him to stop asking about it. Just so no one thinks he's being pushy about it, his reasons were to improve my quality of life and to, in the end, save money on my eye care.

With the way our current health insurance works, we had a large sum of money sitting around in our HSA flex account that needed spending eventually. And after having our expensive little princess in May, the whole family is 100% covered for the rest of the year, so we don't need to use the HSA money for things the insurance will cover. So, the time for LASIK was upon us. I still wasn't crazy about the whole blade on my eye thing ::shiver::, but as I started to research the latest with LASIK to see if I would even be a candidate (astigmatism and all), I found that they have a new bladeless LASIK. They use a different laser to cut the corneal flap and then use the other laser to actually reshape the eye tissue. So Jacob and I had the LASIK discussion again and I called the place that looked like it had the best prices. For most of the LASIK places, they'll give you a free screening, basically to tell you if you're a good candidate or not. I figured I could use the free appointment to see if I liked the place or not and keep looking if I had reservations.

About 3 weeks ago, I had an appointment at the Excel Eye Center in Provo. They were very nice and very professional and also having a summer sale! Made my decision easy at least. :) The end result of my screening was that I was a good candidate, but like everyone else, I needed to abstain from contacts for 2 weeks so they could get a more clear view of my cornea or something like that. So 2 weeks of glasses later, I went back for my final check-up prior to surgery. The doctor looked at my eyes. Then he looked again. Then he said "Hmm." (Alarms going off anyone??)

He told me he thought my optic nerve looked swollen and he wanted me to go see a retinal specialist to get his opinion. He also wanted me to have a field vision test as a secondary test to see if I had optic nerve edema. So off to the specialist I went and off to the field vision test I went. The result of the retinal specialist (besides everyone in the office thinking Hazel was so adorable) is that my optic nerves are more rounded than the average optic nerve, but he thought that was just my eye and not a problem. He did say that if he thought it was optic nerve edema, I'd be off to the hospital for a brain MRI. Joy. But things looked good, but we need to watch it over time to make sure that they are.

One thing the specialist did find is that I had a retinal tear, which apparently is very common in near-sighted eyes. So I talked it over with him and with the LASIK doctor and in about a month, I'll go back to the specialist to have another quick laser treatment to "spot-weld" (his words, not mind) that tear. (Another random fact, after Nicole and I put our brains together with Mom and Dad, we figured out why the specialist I saw looked so familiar: his family used to live in Mom and Dad's ward when Nicole was a Laurel. Small world, eh?)

Since the results of the specialist and the field vision test were good, LASIK was a go for yesterday morning. I had some serious problems sleeping the night before, though I wasn't consciously nervous or excited - I just couldn't sleep. Jacob didn't want me to be late, so we arrived 10 minutes early, which was early enough to watch the broadcast of the surgery on the guy that was going before me on the TV in the waiting area. I didn't look.

Then it was my turn. First, they put on a hair net (Jacob joked he was surprised they had one big enough to contain all my hair) and little booties on my feet. They swabbed my eyelids down with iodine (which was surprisingly soothing for my nerves), cleaned that off and gave me numbing drops. The doctor came in to mark "6 o'clock" on my eyes (apparently when we lay down, our eyes turn slightly out, so they have to mark to make sure they cut the flap in the correct place). After asking him if I should feel the marker stinging like that, I was giving several more rounds of numbing drops. They walked me into the operating room and had me lay down in a chair that strangely resembled a dentist's chair.

Suction cups on my eyes to hold them still while the first laser cut the flap, lots of pushing and prodding to get the flap to come up, holding my head still and that lovely burning smell as the laser did its job, and then some more pushing and prodding to get the flap to go back in place and we were done! The part I was actually dreading the most was the metal thing the put in the eye for the second laser to hold the eye open. Turns out that by that point, I could only see big gray patches and the light they told me to focus on to keep my eye relatively still, so I didn't even see it when they put it in. Then lots of instructions about my cornucopia of eye drops and what I could and couldn't do the rest of the day and we were done. The next several hours were pretty obnoxious. I was starting to be able to see, but looking at anything made my head hurt. I wanted to go to sleep, but the doctor suggested that I didn't. Eyes tend to move a lot during sleep, so he wanted me to stay awake all day to give the flap more time to reattach.

So I rocked in my glider rocker and kept reminding myself that I signed up for this. After my post-op appointment several hours after the surgery, I was feeling much better. I had also decided that ibuprofen was a good thing and had partaken liberally. And the doctor said everything looked great and that my vision was already 20/30, which did a lot to sooth my worries. So other than scaring Hazel when I looked at her with my eye shields on, it was a pretty uneventful day after that. I just relaxed and played some Wii and watched a movie with Jacob and our friends that had come over to keep me company. I have to sleep with the eye shields on for a week so I don't accidentally rub my eyes in my sleep and I still have lots of eye drops to keep using every day for a while, but my eye sight is still getting better. I'm sitting at my computer typing this, and I can clearly read the microwave clock from here, which is probably about 15-20 feet away. Considering how blind I was before, this is a huge improvement.

Jacob has asked several times if I still think he's handsome now that I can really see him, and of course, he is. :) Now that I don't have to wear the eye shields during the day, Hazel likes me again, though I think she's still trying to figure out where my glasses went. I'm still waiting for my contacts to start bugging me or something anti-climatic like that. It hasn't fully sunk in yet that I can see all on my own, but I'm sure it will soon. Technology's a pretty cool thing.