The Wonders of LASIK

Such a wonderful thing to be able to see with my own eyes again.  I’m now on Day 8 of my post-op and I have to say it’s kind of amazing.  I can see everything so clearly.  I still feel a little pain from time to time, but it’s manageable.  That said, I just wish someone would have told me a few things I should have had on hand for afterwards.

1)    A big box of tissues for the ride home. 

Your cornea is connected to your eyeball.  Your eyeball is connected to your tear duct.  Your tear duct is connected to your nose duct......or something like that.  Basically when the tears start flowing, the nose starts running.  While you most likely won’t be sobbing after the surgery, you have just had a very invasive procedure on your eyes and your tear ducts will be on overdrive, which means (at least in my case) your nose will be as well.   So unless you like using you shirt as a Kleenex (I will neither confirm nor deny I did this), you’ll want to have a ready supply on hand.

2)    Bring a big thick blindfold or better yet an ostrichpillow.

Everyone said I’d be sensitive to light. Nobody told me that I’d border on vampire abhorrence of sunlight.  On the ride home, I was wearing double sets of sunglasses, and I was still trying to bury my face in my lap while mumbling, "It burns. It burns."

3)    Less sticky medical tape 

After the procedure is over, you’ll need to wear these plastic shields over your eyes at night to prevent you from rubbing your eyes in your sleep. The shields are fine, but the tape they used leaves behind this gunky stickiness that is impossible to wash, rub, and scrub off; I tried every substance short of battery acid to remove it to no avail.  Now imagine having to use that tape every single night for month.  No bueno.  So I went to the store and found some medical paper tape that isn’t quite as sticky, but not nearly as gunky either.  Though it does require a little extra tape to get the job done, so you may end up looking like this each night:

4)  Sleeping pills that work

After the procedure, they want you to go right home and sleep for five hours at a minimum.  As the anesthetic eye drops wears off, there will be pain, and it's better if you can sleep through that.  They gave me one valium for the procedure; it is what my grandma would have called a "don't give a $hit pill," and it worked pretty well for that.  I was feeling pretty good about the world, and I had zero anxiety going into the procedure.  As I left the office, they handed me two Valium for when I got home, and in theory I'd go right to sleep.  Unfortunately it turns out that taking more valium does not make me sleep, but it does lead to behaving very drunk; the only thing I really remember from that time is that my eyes hurt.  If you got a phone call from me that evening, I apologize for anything I may have said.  So the moral of the story is that there are several safe sleeping pills available, ask your doctor if you can get a prescription for a couple of them beforehand to see what works for you, then take that after the procedure.

So there are my thoughts on LASIK.  Overall I was very satisfied with the procedure and I love the fact I can see without any sort assistance.  I'm going to try swimming today.  Wish me luck.  :)

Roses and Bamboo

I remember going through the store as a child and seeing tiny containers of miniature roses, and thinking to myself that these were the most beautiful flowers in the world.  

So naturally when I decided to try my hand at indoor horticulture as an adult, I started with a miniature rose.  Within a few weeks, it got mites and died.  I bought another one.  Within a few weeks, it got some sort of a fungus thing and died.  So I wised up and did some online research on miniature roses and then bought another one.  Within a few weeks, it got both mites and a fungus thing and died. 

A smarter person may have scrapped the whole miniature rose concept.  Not me, I was going to make it work.  I just needed to figure out how to keep the plant healthy.  I did even more research and bought all the necessary sprays and fertilizers and then bought another plant.   After a long drawn out three months of battling mites and fungus thing, the rose died.  I really, really wanted to have a healthy happy miniature rose, but the roses simply wouldn't grow for me.  

Fast forward a decade.  I happen to pick up a bamboo plant at an outdoor market.  I didn't think much of it and set it on my desk.  Based on my experiences with the roses, I didn't expect it to live very long.  We've had a rough time together. I've forgotten to water it for week long stretches, and as result had to cut way half of it's leaves from time to time.  At one point all it's leaves turned yellow, and I found out I was supposed to be giving it fertilizer, so I had to cut it back down to the stalks to start over.  Yet it came back to life and it's still with me.  

I'd venture that we all have miniature roses and bamboos in our life.  While we constantly strive to make the roses bloom only to watch them shrivel away in our hands, there is a bamboo plant we keep in the background that seems to grow no matter what.  If we could simply walk away from the wasted effort on the miniature roses and instead really focus on helping that bamboo grow, we'd find our time is better spent and the results much more satisfying.  That's my deep thought for the day. :)