The Irony is Not Lost on Me

It was some time in high school. A friend turned to me at lunch and said, "What's wrong with your eye?" I whipped out my trusty mirror and found a broken capillary. This is no cause for concern, really, except I'd never had nor seen that happen to my eye before. Off to the office, a call to my mother, and before I knew it, I'm being examined by our family eye doctor. What amazed both she and my mother was that I could see at all. I left that day with a pair of brand new, headache inducing glasses.

Where is the aforementioned irony, you ask? Why, it's in the four (or more) broken capillaries in my eyes now, that mark the end of my glasses-wearing days (at least for a few years and excluding sunglasses). You see, I subjected myself to someone frying my eyes with a laser this past Monday, otherwise known as LASIK surgery.

Sickly blood-shot eyes aside (it's really not that bad, by the way) and a little more dryness than I'm used to, I feel great. In fact, Wednesday when I went back to work was horrible, because I could think of a thousand things I'd rather be looking at than my work on the computer screen (the snowflakes falling like a blizzard outside but that didn't accumulate on the roads, for one). My surgeon said I'm seeing pretty good now, and it's only going to improve as my eyes heal. I guess, so far, the best improvement is being able to recognize the person on the other end of the room waving frantically at me. It's nice to be able to see the different trees in my backyard instead of the wall of trees it once was, and to sit in front of the TV and not have to wonder about where my glasses are.

The surgery itself is... well... not for you if you're not a risk-taker. They didn't prepare me for when they put a cap over my eye and then I went blind. They didn't prepare me for the funky sounds the laser would make. And they didn't prepare me for the indescribable sensation of having the outermost part of your eye peeled back like skin of a banana (even with lots of numbing). But yeah, it wasn't so bad. And it's so nice to be able to look out over my computer screen and see the old oak that rules over our lot, not just a blur of brown.

Cheers!