Post-Lasik debriefing

If you are considering Lasik eye surgery I will share with you some of my experience. I am not a doctor and I have no idea why you might think that I am one, but I feel compelled to make that disclaimer. The one thing I heard over and over is that everyone's experience is a little different. This is mine. It may not be yours.

What I learned:

-If, while you are in the waiting room trying to relax and seeing if you can feel the Valium kicking in, do not be alarmed if someone runs out of the operating room screaming "MY EYES ARE LIKE TWO BURNING POOLS OF FIRE." When this happened to me, unfortunately I panicked, and Alex had to talk me out of sprinting out of the medical center directly into traffic. I tried really hard not to cry at all.

-Crying with numbing drops in your eyes burns a little but it's not unbearable. Not like burning pools of fire or anything.

-You get to sleep in goggles for a week. Subsequently, you might not sleep very well for a week.

-I developed cat-like night vision for the first few days. In the darkest of rooms, with sunglasses on, I could see everything. The light from a cell phone was a piercing brightness from which I had to turn away. I don't know if my eyes reflected like a cat because I didn't think to check.

-I'm not sure how I didn't know this before, but I learned that I like to sleep on my side with my face smushed up in the pillow. The goggles prevented me from doing this even a little bit. Thus I had to sleep on my back like a corpse. Thus I had corpse-like stiffness in my neck that lasted all week.

-Do you have any idea how many times in the course of a day you touch your eyes? It's about 1000 times more than you think it is. Just see how often you catch yourself doing this when it's forbidden.

-You will get very good at putting in eye drops. This is because you will put different drops into each eye every fifteen minutes the day of your surgery. The next week it's much easier and you only have to put two different kinds of drops in every four hours and a third kind of drop every hour. Simple. You too will get good at it though I doubt you will ever enjoy doing it.

-No sudoku for a week. I am now admitting that I do sudoku at night to help me fall asleep. Instead, I listened to the Cast-on podcast and it was very special. It was like someone reading me a bedtime story. And I could close my eyes and dream about rubbing them endlessly.

-You have to learn to let yourself look at the clock first thing in the morning without putting on glasses. I am still struggling with this.

-I know this is a long list. Honestly I could keep going. I'll spare you the minutiae of my life for the rest of the evening. See what happens on the rest days of the Tour de France? I go nuts and get wordy!