The Consultation

A couple months ago, I decided to let a man I don’t know shoot laser beams at my eyeballs.

“What the hell for?” you might ask.

“So I can see without fugly glasses or contacts that make it feel like I just stuck anchovies in my eyes,” I might reply.

I got glasses in the fourth grade because I couldn’t see the blackboard at school. If I’d known then that the only things written on fourth grade blackboards are homework assignments and “New Math” that would become “Old Math” in six months, I wouldn’t have bothered. A few years later, when I discovered girls and their apparent dislike for guys with glasses not worn by Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear, I switched to contact lenses.

For the next 18 years, I was what eye doctors refer to as “I Can’t Believe His Eyes Haven’t Fallen Out” because I wore my contacts for months on end without taking them out.

“Holy shit! Aren’t you supposed to take them out every day?” you might ask.

“Mind your business,” I might reply.

So that’s why I found myself at a LASIK surgery consultation far too early one morning. Seven observations from that wonderful day…

1) The doctor that did my consultation was wearing glasses. Let me explain this to the slow folks: The eye doctor trying to convince me to spend three grand on laser eye surgery had not had the surgery himself, hence the glasses. I cannot think of one good reason for this, especially since it’d be free for him. He also seemed very excited about shooting lasers into my eyes; a desire no one had expressed to me since the kid pretending to be Boba Fett during recess in the third grade (which could be what fucked my eyes up in the first place). This made me nervous, but the consultation was free and I like free shit.

2) Eye doctors who are going to get right up in your face with that little light should always have Altoids handy. This guy’s breath smelled like the armpit of a gorilla locked in the dumpster outside of a Chinese restaurant during the ninth week of a waste management strike. Ask me how I know.

3) One portion of the LASIK consultation brochure reads, “98% of post-op patients who returned for follow-up visits had their vision restored to 20/20 or better!” This struck me as an odd way to word it, because I immediately thought that 100% of post-op patients who did not return for follow-up visits are now wandering the streets blind, hoping to one day find their way back to the clinic so they can beat Dr. Stinky to death with their nifty new red-tipped canes.

4) I was not a candidate for standard LASIK surgery. If you haven’t heard much about LASIK, they cut a flap from the surface of your eyeball, shoot the Frickin’ Laser Beams underneath, then put the flap back and hope you’re not blind. My eyeballs apparently don’t have enough (whatever) to cut a flap, so I only qualify for PRK. PRK, which probably stands for something, is a procedure where they simply say, “Screw the flap. Let’s just shoot the lasers in his eye and see what happens.” The up side is that I would heal faster without all the flap-cutting nonsense. The down side is that it’s a one-shot deal that probably can’t be corrected if they make a mistake (like forgetting which eye is which or accidentally leaving the laser on till it hits brain).

5) They had me sign the finance paperwork and medical waivers AFTER they dilated my eyes. Drops that dilate your pupils are pretty routine during a thorough eye exam these days. With dilated pupils, nearsighted people like myself become temporarily farsighted. In other words, I couldn’t see shit up close even if I put my glasses back on. So for all I knew I was signing $500,000 loan papers for a 1977 AMC Pacer, or medical waivers permitting the removal of both of my kidneys and listing “flammable urine” and “accelerated leprosy” as possible side effects. I signed the papers anyway because…

6) The finance lady was hot. As far as I could tell.

7) Even after all this scary shit, a man will sign up and pay for anything that involves shooting lasers. Hey, lasers are cool.

More on this later…

Tags: lasik, prk, laser eye surgery, lasics