Laser? I hardly even OMG GROSS but hey awesome

On Friday I took Aaron to get LASIK eye surgery, something he’s been saving and psyching up for for several years. His eyes aren’t (weren’t) super bad, but he does (did) need glasses for astigmatism, and can’t tolerate contacts. So instead of putting something irritating in his eyes every day to replace glasses, he decided to put a whole big shitload of horrible crap in his eyes on one day to replace glasses. And jeebus, that nonsense is magic. Aside from needing regular drops and still having some wonkiness, he was driving clear-visioned and glasses-less by Saturday morning, when his doctor told him at the post-op appointment that he was at 20/15 and it would only get better. We’ve already given the glasses to the cat. He likes to play glasses.

I didn’t really know what to expect, because my consolation prize for being pretty much a lemon overall is that I’ve never needed optometry (nor orthodontia) of any kind. The whole procedure took about 30 minutes from beginning to end, and they let me watch. And by “let me watch,” I mean there’s a camera on the machine and they projected his eyeball up on a big TV screen that I could see through a window from the next room. His big, vulnerable, held-open, weeping, bleeding, being-stabbed-with-needles-and-shot-up-with lasers eyeball. And then the other one. Not only that, but I was sitting in an area that any other patients could easily have walked through, and could see what was about to be done to them/had just been done to them. First they slice off a “flap” from the outer layer of the cornea*, go to town underneath, and then pat the flap back and flood the whole thing with liquid that I can only assume numbs everything to prevent the immediate onset of post-traumatic stress disorder (because the patient has to be awake the whole time in order to focus on the laser).

The whole thing of course has already proven itself worth it, and they eyes are apparently amazingly resilient little fuckers. We went to Toys R Us today just so Aaron could enjoy focusing on bright objects. I’m enormously happy for him, and also, given my own surgery next month, a little more grateful for the invention of general anesthesia. Anyway, if you’ve ever considered laser eye surgery, totally do it. Just do not hang out by that window before you go in.

*You probably don’t want to click on this. Er, you probably didn’t want to click on that.