Having my eyes fixed #tinychallenges

I always hated wearing glasses. My first pair were acquired sometime in middle school and they were almost immediately relegated to the desk drawer. True, my eyesight was poor enough that I should have been wearing them, but they irritated me to be on my face all the time.

After an early crash after I had just turned 16, my parents insisted on purchasing me new glasses and that I wear them when driving. Considering it was that or not having a car, I wore them. A couple years later, as I was graduating high school, I upgraded to contacts. Yes, these were miserable to wear for an allergy sufferer like myself, but they were still less bad than glasses.

Contacts were a constant of my life for the next 15 year, until that day when riding the L train in Chicago, a good 30 minutes from anywhere I wanted to be, and a contact popped out of my eye. That's it, I'm done with this garbage; its time to get my eyes fixed.

A quick consult showed that I wasn't a great candidate for LASIK; my eyes just were not shaped right to make it a nearly risk-free procedure. However, my doctor recommended that I have implanted contact lenses instead. It was a rare procedure, but one that resulted in me having perfect vision from essentially the moment the surgery was complete.

There were several memorable moments of this process. One was the fact that I was having the surgery at the same location as a large number of elderly people were having cataract surgery. The nurse assumed I was having that surgery instead and asked which eye I was having done. I told her both and she said they don't do cataract surgery on both eyes at once. I (politely) suggested she reread her paperwork because I was not there for cataract surgery!

When the doctor arrived, he immediately pulled out a sharpie and wrote an "L" above my left eye and a "R" above my right eye. This was a requirement of the hospital (and I'm sure the insurance company) so that the doctor wouldn't get confused in the surgery and put the wrong lens in the wrong eye.

The surgery itself was interesting to participate in. Your vision goes cloudy in the middle as the doctor inserts the new lens; it looks like someone has just put a roll of saran wrap over your eye. As it unfolds, your vision slowly improves until it pops into place and you have instant perfect vision.

Possibly the worst part of the whole surgery was the anesthetic. I had been given this particular one previously and never had any issue, but this time was different. On the drive home, we grabbed take-out and I snacked on a few french fries during the car ride. That was a mistake. My stomach was not accepting food and those fries made it as far as my back yard before they were expelled in a starchy spray. Not my finest moment.

All in all, I'd do it again in a heart-beat. One of the best decisions I've ever made.