PRK

Hello, blog! I've missed you but obviously not enough to take 5 minutes to update you even though I've been able to for like a week now. So much has happened.... let's see, what can we talk about?

Blah, in short I got my eyes lasered and have perfect vision, but in doing so I have rediscovered the plague of undereye circles and puffiness that I can no longer hide with glasses. I've always had this problem, but add to that the fact that I haven't slept properly since I got back to New York, shake, chill, and basically I look way scary all the time so instead of people going "OMG YOU LOOK AWESOME WITHOUT GLASSES!" they're like "Oh, you're back.... so are your eyes ok?"

But to give you the full story, yes. My eyes are fabulous.

For years, my dad had been pestering me to get LASIK surgery because of the cool kids, and I finally relented and got a consultation this summer. The consultation said I have thin corneas (yeah, I know, losery) but that I was still a candidate for PRK (photorefractive keratectomy), which is similar to LASIK. The difference is that with LASIK, they cut a flap in your cornea and flip it up, do the laser thing, and then flip it back down. PRK creates no permanent flap, they just remove a portion of the out layer of your cornea (a WEIRD sensation, I might add) and then let that heal. PRK takes longer to recover from, and is supposed to be painful, but it's techincally a less invasive procedure.

Anyway, so they give you a pill of the calming variety and then numbing eyedrops, thank God, because the next step is lying in the chair and having those Clockwork Orange eye opening clamps put in your eye and being forced to watch as the doctor cuts and scrapes away the top layer of your eyeball. It's completely bizarre. It bunches up like cellophane, and then they pick it up with tweezers. It's about as close to you as anything you've seen, yet there's still this sense of distance like it's happening a centimeter or so from your eye. Vision's a funny thing.

Anyway, then all you have to do is stare at this red dot for 30 seconds to a minute. It's got a big white circle around it. As you do this, try not to think about the fact that the dot is actually a sizzling laser melting your eyeballs. My doctor was really good at making me feel at ease by ignoring me and talking to the nurses about sports. I figured "If he's not worried, I'm not worried," though by the end I started to feel ignored and said some inane things to draw the attention back to me like "This is fun. I wish I had a third eye."

Going into this procedure, I was a little nervous because people on the internet reported major pain the few days after the surgery. They were all "OMG TAKE YOUR VALIUM BEFORE YOU GO IN OR YOU WILL REGRET IT!" My cousin Kevin had PRK too, and he said he was so sensitive to light for the first few days that he couldn't even look at the clock on his stereo and had to sit in complete darkness in his basement. So imagine my surprise when I woke up the next day with no pain and walked upstairs into the sunny kitchen for a bagel with no problem. It was like I was a normal person, except I couldn't read or focus properly or watch TV or stare at a computer. So I listened to my Harry Potter audio books for 3 days before I was comfortable enough to watch the entire last season of Charmed in a day. (OMG, the girl from that nerd sitcom was in it and she was a witch looking for her lost sister but then they turned EVIL, it was so awesome and shitty!) A little light sensitivity prevented me from a sunny afternoon out, but that passed too! And now I can see perfectly, and it is only getting better every day! Also, I have a bottle of codine I never used if anyone's interested.

The last part of my story is about the woman at the sunglasses store, but I will tell it later because it is coffee time and this is long.