Eyeball Extraction

The majority of the people who I talked to before having my eyeball poked and burned claimed that I would be fine the next day, ready to bounce off the walls with my new found sight. Most of them said how much I would absolutely love opening my eyes and being able to see!

The adventure starts with $250 worth of prescriptions eye drops that I start taking two weeks before surgery. I end up absorbing the costs because that is what you do when you have a Health Savings Account. I asked the nurse if I really needed to have those eye drops because she had hinted that they were optional. She asked what my age was. I asked her what that had to do with the answer. She said that after the age of 30 your tear ducts don’t work as well. I said “I get it you’re saying I’m old”. She said “Sorry, but yes I am.” I learn that my tear ducts are connected to my mucus membranes that end up in my mouth. So all the wonderfully bitter antibiotics, steroids, and 3 other interesting eye drops I take throughout this episode would end up in my mouth.

At the surgery center after all the money and CYA documentation have been taken care of they put me in a chair where they drop one numbing drop in each eye and offer me an oral pain killer\relaxer with a shot of carrot juice to wash it down. After a few minutes they give me a second numbing drop in each eye. I am prepped by a pretty assistant and think well at least if I went blind she would be one of the last things I saw.

They lay me down and use a device to keep my eyelids from shutting. My reflexive muscles start firing to close the lids to protect my eyes. I find this mildly uncomfortable but am able to control my muscles from firing after a few seconds. The doctor starts poking at my eye with a tool. After about the fourth poke the assistant asks if I can feel it. I respond with a very definite yes. She then floods my eye with about 8 numbing drops. I lay there wondering why they didn’t do that in the first place. After a few more pokes they place a ring around my eyeball. I still have feeling in my eye at this time. Luckily my eye would finally lose feeling shortly after this because it is quite uncomfortable to have a ring put around your eyeball and have it poked. Just about when I lose sensory in my eye the whole world goes dark. I had been warned that at a certain point in the procedure everything would go dark. This is very valuable information because you can imagine the reaction of some people when her eyes are open but everything goes pitch black while someone is working on her eye. One really understands how serious of a decision he has made to have surgery when his whole world goes dark. As I start regaining light in my eye I can hear the laser going and smell the scorching of my eyeball.

Strangely the second eye was even more uncomfortable for me. My reflexive flinching was much more sever. My reflexes are causing my eye to close against the suppressor tools while my active mind is trying to keep them open. This causes me to shake and I try to alert the doctor that my head is shaking. He misunderstands it as me being fearful and tells me to take deep breaths…I would have rolled my eyes at him except I knew that would have been a very bad thing to do during eye surgery. The way I saw it was that even though my eyes weren’t closing the reflexive muscles were still causing my head to move. Apparently they were not moving my head enough to bother the doctor though and he continues poking at the eyeball. Again after the assistant asks if I can feel it and again I respond with a very definite yes. Again she floods my eyeball with numbing drops. I would have thought she would have figured out the first time that two drops were not enough for me. The numbing drops do help stop the reflexive eyelid flinching.

The doctor puts a heavily weighted medical contact on my right eye because it is supposed to help it heal better. They give me sunglasses to put on as I go out the door to keep anything from flying into my eye.
I go into the surgery center for LASIK to improve my vision. Ironically I leave with worse vision, a medical contact lens in one eye AND glasses.

The second day my left eye is working fairly well (but definitely not 20/20 yet). My right eye (with the contact) cannot see very well at all. My right eye can’t read, see middle or long distances. The doctor decides to leave the medical contact in for another three days. Day three I see improvement in my right eye. Day four more improvement in the right eye, it is good enough that I can read now. Tomorrow is day 5, hopefully they can take the medical contact lens out. My eyes are still very gruesomely bloodshot.