DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

My vision sucks like a vacuum with a brand-new bag. My eyesight is so poor, the optometrist doesn’t say “what’s the smallest line you can read;” he says, “Just point at the wall.” The kids didn’t call me “four eyes” because that wouldn’t have counted the two I was born with.

So I’ve been considering surgery. I don’t consider that lightly; I’m terrified. As poorly as my eyes work, they are critically important to me. I realize the value of decent eyesight because I so rarely enjoy it. In other words, it’s easy for me to imagine being blind, at least functionally so, because that’s how I wake up every day.

A friend with a comparable case of myopia was telling me about his recent LASIK experience. He’d been impressed at how easy and painless the whole prodecure was. He summed it up as a “non-event.” With admirable nonchalance he described the operation: the cocaine drops to deaden the nerves in the eyeball… the insertion of a speculum to keep the lids open… the incising of tissue from the cornea… the reshaping of the stroma via excimer laser…

The longer he talked, the more nauseous I became. True, I’d had a number of beers the night before, and the number was about 12, so I had a head-start on nausea. But the idea of someone taking a knife and slicing off the front of my eye is enough to make me writhe. I had to squat down on the grass and do breathing exercises.

I’m well aware that, afterwards, painful and grotesque medical experiences make fun stories, as if all the fear and anxiety suffered in advance pay off in entertainment value months and years later. I’m sure I could work up the courage to pay someone lots of money to cut a flap in my eyeball and shoot a laser into my skull… as evidenced by my friend’s experience, it makes a great story, and he wasn’t even going for the gross-out. My version would doubtless inspire acute squirming, even in people who weren’t hung over. And yet, somehow, I’m still ambivalent.

Surgicaleyes.org is a terrific resource, in both the common meanings of the word. The Image Center provides simulations of post-surgery vision abnormalities. The Bulletin Board contains tens of thousands of messages from doctors and patients, providing hundreds of pages of intelligent, generally well-researched commentary. It’s epic.

John — thanks for the inspiration, the story, and the link.