Would people still date me if I ended up looking like Batou from "Ghost in the Shell?"
I dealt with several different people the morning of my surgery. One girl helped me start the paperwork. Another girl scanned my eyes to get my exact cornea topography. One of the doctors talked to me about the LASIK procedure and answered my questions about the monovision option (where you purposely correct one eye for far-sightedness, but leave the other near-sighted. This makes me feel crazy just typing this.) I decided my goal for the surgery would be to try and fix both of my crippled eyes to have the best far vision possible. The lady doctor assured me this was a great choice for me.
The male doctor who would be conducting my surgery came in and told me some useful information. He said there would be quite a lot of pressure put on my eyes during the procedure, and it would actually help if I opened my mouth. "Like in a silent scream?" I asked, opening my mouth. His eyes widened and he said, "Wow. That's a big one." I laughed, even though I was kind of terrified I was about to be permanently blinded by some freak laser mishap. I told the doctor that I was kind of a spaz, and that I was convinced I would move my eyes during the procedure and mess everything up. He assured me that wouldn't happen because the laser "tracks your eye." He said the laser would automatically stop if the tracking became too far off field, and he could also stop the laser at any time. He was very warm and charismatic, which was a little depressing because I was wearing a hairnet and absolutely no make-up. (You also cannot wear make-up for the entire week after LASIK surgery. Ugh.) He told me to look at the green light during the surgery, so I kept repeating, "Green light, green light, green light" so I wouldn't forget. He told me he would tell me what to do when I got into the surgical room, and he instructed me to go ahead and put a valium on my tongue. I was very happy to do this, and I was even happier when it kicked in a few minutes later.
After the valium fog hit me (thank GOD) I was escorted into the surgical room. I slid back onto the table and inched my head into some kind of cradle as instructed. A lady put numbing drops in my eyes, and I told her I had read a blog about a man who said his drops didn't fully numb one of his eyes and he could feel the pain of the laser in that eye. She asked if I wanted another drop, and I said, "If there are no side effects, then YES please." She gave me an extra drop in each eye, and for that reason I will always love that woman. (I could not see her face clearly and I have no idea who she is. But this is a true love story.) A man put a squeezy-ball thing in my right hand, which I held with a death grip, and he asked me if I wanted a blanket. I said, "Um, YES. Thank you."
Things moved very quickly. The table automatically moved me from underneath one laser to the next. Something was placed over one eye and pressed down, and my vision went black. I could feel quite a bit of pressure on my left eye, but it did not hurt at all. When the pressure ring came down on my right eye (or whatever the hell it was. It felt like a ring pushing around the edge of my eyeball), it felt like it wasn't placed quite evenly and there was too much pressure at the top of my eye. I almost said, "Let's try that one again!" but the squeezy-ball man started counting down from 10 seconds and I knew I could tolerate it for that long. The laser part was very blurry, and I saw a bunch of uniformly distributed tiny little blurry red lights that were moving, and there was a group of green lights in the center of the red lights. I remembered I was supposed to look at the green light, so I tried to do that. I could not find an accurate picture of what these blurry little lights looked like to me, but the one below is somewhat similar to what I saw.
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