Oh, SH*T, so that's what you look like!!!
Welcome to my week.
Last week, at the gentle (repetitive) nudging of my dad, I went to see what this whole Lasik thing was about. I had exactly 2 friends I could name who had had it. One did it at the end of high school and has since had halo vision. The other raved about it. So, 50/50 in my cup, I went over to the office, eager dad in tow.
One might stop the story right here and ask why my dad doesn't do Lasik himself. To answer all one of you (hi mom!), he thinks men look distinguished with glasses. The implication was that women do not. After 4 days of wearing my old pair of glasses at the doctor's request, I was more than ready to cast them aside. Yuck. They look so cute on people, but not on me. Instead of my usual "You're 27? But you look 16!", I had started to look like a 16 year old prodigy (read: nerd), which is just weird. And to others, I must have appeared a 16 year old prodigy with an attitude problem. I was ready to get me some eyeballs.
The point is (and I'm leaving out a whole 1.5 hours of boring eye testing) that they told me I'm a great candidate. I felt like I had done something worthy. Like gotten good grades and been accepted somewhere. But really they were just telling me that I'm (WAS!) so damn blind that they'd take pity on me and beam lasers into my face until they could f*** me up enough to fix me. Ta da. I didn't even really understand how they would do it, but it sounded cool, and hey, it worked for half of my friends. So, never one to dawdle, I asked them when they could give me new eyeballs. They said "tomorrow".
Someone noted that I am really spontaneous when it comes to things like this. He said it as a compliment, but when I tell you that my "spontenaity" landed me a hot date for surgery on my eyes (the only two that God gave me, I should note) on Friday the 13th, perhaps you won't agree. But Friday the 13th has always been my lucky day. Now, I will proceed to give you snippets, ie. "Best of Lilly in Surgery":
Scene 1: (Lilly has just been given Xanax for the first time)
Nurse: Ok, Lilly. I just have one question for you.
Lilly: Sure.
Nurse: When is your birthday?
Lilly: ----
Lilly: ----
Lilly: um....
Nurse (smiling): Perfect. You can lie down now.
Scene 2:
Doctor: We're going to put drops in your eyes to numb you.
(2 seconds later, dragging what appears to be a green felt marker over my eyeball)
Doctor: Can you feel this?
Scene 3:
Doctor: Now, don't mind the burning smell.
It was just RAD. Seriously. It was my own science fiction movie. It was like Total Recall, except instead of sticking things up my nose, they were sticking them in my eye. And thanks to Xanax, I did NOT care. They could have taken out my eyeballs and sold them on eBay and I would have smiled in my bliss. Beautiful. At some point it did hit me that it was somewhat weird to entrust your visual safety to a complete stranger just because he charges you a lot of money and appears to have gone to Harvard. But I thought this as my vision was closing out and the laser got closer and...
All of 8 minutes later, he (no, he's a god at this point. Let's go with He) told me to sit up and read the clock across the room. So I did. Just like that. Snap. Vision like a hawk.
The prescription they sent me home with pretty much amounted to "rest your eyes. um. see you in a month and half". I had to finally blog about this, so I guess I'm a bad patient, staring at this screen, dear reader. But I needed to share the magic of science with you. First there was Dolly the Sheep. Then there were Lilly's New Eyeballs. Do miracles ever cease?
People keep asking me how the world is different. Well, I can see your ugly face, for one. Everything is just in FOCUS. I don't know how else to explain it. I mean, when you have messed up eyes, you just wear your contacts 25 hours a day and trudge along and assume you see what you need to get by. But then I got home and I was like "Oh, so THIS is what the view from my window is like." I used to stand on my balcony and point visitors in the general direction of Petco Park and just say "so there's the Park". Now I can tell you the colors of the cars parked on the lot in front of it. A parking lot I notably didn't even know existed until Saturday afternoon. I can see the pretty buildings in Mission Valley. I can see a few cars ahead of me when I'm driving down the highway -- with my newly improved LillyNightVision. Getting up and seeing what my room looks like first thing in the morning. This is living. I guess mostly I see views I couldn't see before. But it's just about knowing you can trust your eyes. That they're showing you everything. Forget 20/20. I got me some 20/15, biyatch.
This week I will be doing a study on the effect of Lasik on beer goggles. Naturally.
So, you see, this week, while my friends are nanu-nanu-ing each other and getting all hot and bothered about the new installment in the Star Wars series (before you ask, yes, grown adults apparently lose sleep over this. I can introduce you, but I think you need to know some sort of handshake.) But me? I'm over it. I've been lasered and tasered and I *am* the Battlestar Galactica.
Or something like that.
Scene 3:
Doctor: Now, don't mind the burning smell.
It was just RAD. Seriously. It was my own science fiction movie. It was like Total Recall, except instead of sticking things up my nose, they were sticking them in my eye. And thanks to Xanax, I did NOT care. They could have taken out my eyeballs and sold them on eBay and I would have smiled in my bliss. Beautiful. At some point it did hit me that it was somewhat weird to entrust your visual safety to a complete stranger just because he charges you a lot of money and appears to have gone to Harvard. But I thought this as my vision was closing out and the laser got closer and...
All of 8 minutes later, he (no, he's a god at this point. Let's go with He) told me to sit up and read the clock across the room. So I did. Just like that. Snap. Vision like a hawk.
The prescription they sent me home with pretty much amounted to "rest your eyes. um. see you in a month and half". I had to finally blog about this, so I guess I'm a bad patient, staring at this screen, dear reader. But I needed to share the magic of science with you. First there was Dolly the Sheep. Then there were Lilly's New Eyeballs. Do miracles ever cease?
People keep asking me how the world is different. Well, I can see your ugly face, for one. Everything is just in FOCUS. I don't know how else to explain it. I mean, when you have messed up eyes, you just wear your contacts 25 hours a day and trudge along and assume you see what you need to get by. But then I got home and I was like "Oh, so THIS is what the view from my window is like." I used to stand on my balcony and point visitors in the general direction of Petco Park and just say "so there's the Park". Now I can tell you the colors of the cars parked on the lot in front of it. A parking lot I notably didn't even know existed until Saturday afternoon. I can see the pretty buildings in Mission Valley. I can see a few cars ahead of me when I'm driving down the highway -- with my newly improved LillyNightVision. Getting up and seeing what my room looks like first thing in the morning. This is living. I guess mostly I see views I couldn't see before. But it's just about knowing you can trust your eyes. That they're showing you everything. Forget 20/20. I got me some 20/15, biyatch.
This week I will be doing a study on the effect of Lasik on beer goggles. Naturally.
So, you see, this week, while my friends are nanu-nanu-ing each other and getting all hot and bothered about the new installment in the Star Wars series (before you ask, yes, grown adults apparently lose sleep over this. I can introduce you, but I think you need to know some sort of handshake.) But me? I'm over it. I've been lasered and tasered and I *am* the Battlestar Galactica.
Or something like that.
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