Goodbye Glasses

So I got Lasik Eye Surgery done on Monday.

This may seem a bit out of the blue, but I've really been thinking about it for awhile. It started about a year ago when I started having trouble with my contact lenses. I went in for a routine check up and I saw a new eye doctor since the one I usually go to was booked up solid. And this new doctor she took a look at my eyes and said that they obviously weren't getting enough oxygen. There were apparently a lot of extra blood vessels, which means that the eye was compensating by increasing the blood flow to it. My eyes felt just fine, but hey, the doc knows best. So she gave me a sample of a new contact lens that was supposed to allow more oxygen to reach the eye.

However, I was back again a couple of weeks later because the new contact lenses were awful. My old ones I could wear up to 18 hours a day and they'd be all right, but the new ones, after just 8 hours, were getting so filmy and gunky that I could hardly see out of them. My new eye doctor looked at my eyes and said, "Well, they are obviously getting more oxygen. They look a lot better." Well, really, that's great, and I'm happy for my eyes. But I can't see.

So then she gave me a new set of trial lenses. And they were definitely an improvement on the old ones, but still not as good as the ones I had in the first place. I didn't want to go back and try yet another pair of lenses, but I wanted to be able to see. So I just started wearing my glasses again. But I didn't want to do that forever either, so...

Surgery it was. And I'm glad I did it. It's really, really quite amazing. I had the surgery on Monday morning. The whole procedure took about 15 minutes. The actually "laser" part of the procedure only takes a few seconds on each eye. 41 seconds on my left and 38 seconds on my right to be specific. Then they make you go straight home, or in my case, to a hotel, and lay down with your eyes closed for four hours. (I listened to Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett on CD, thanks Ash it was great, looking forward to Wintersmith).

And you're supposed to take lots of eye drops, both antibacterial and lubricating, and above all DO NOT RUB YOUR EYES!!!!! (And it really was written like that in my post-op instructions, five exclamation marks and all).

24 hours after my surgery, I could see almost as clearly as I could with my glasses, and was pronounced fit to drive home. Amazing, eh?

So now I am one of those people who don't wear glasses or contact lenses. I'm not really sure how it feels yet, because my eyes are still healing, so they feel dry and scratchy a lot of the time, like I've left my contact lenses in for way too long. And my vision is supposed to continue to fluctuate for the next two weeks. But when that's over, I think it will sink in and be really cool.

One thing that I kind of slightly regret is that it's quite possible that I'll have absolutely no reason to wear glasses again (at least until I'm fifty and have to start wearing reading glasses). And sometimes it was cool to have that option. Cuz some glasses just look really cool. And I also liked to wear them when I wanted to appear intelligent or serious. So, maybe I'll have to get a pair of glasses with either plain glass lenses, or really weak lenses (depending on how good my vision finally ends up being) just to have a pair of glasses to wear when I want them.

But, for right now, I can't afford them. Because the surgery was really, really expensive. But so, so worth it.