So, I had my LASIK consultation back in Part 1, where the Evil Consultation Doctors both scared the shit outta me and convinced me to sign up anyway.

Three weeks later, it was time to let a whole new doctor strap me to a table and shoot laser beams at my eyes.

“A whole new doctor?” you might ask.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I might reply.

The official explanation is that the Actual Laser Doctor only shows up a couple times a month to perform the surgeries. He lives someplace else and flies in to several clinics across the United States to fix broken eyes. It sounds like a cool job, though why they let him onto airplanes with laser guns, I’ll never know. Regardless, the Evil Consultation Doctors find this to be a perfectly plausible explanation.

Me? I’m thinking we’ve got a guy who cruises into town from an unknown location, possibly a secret laboratory usually reserved for James Bond villains, shoots defenseless, mostly-blind people in the eyes with laser beams, then hightails it back to the airport, where he boards a private jet and returns home to plot his next evil scheme and strangle some puppies.

In order to receive your laser beams, you must bring with you large sums of money and someone to drive you home, probably because many people have to sell their cars to come up with large sums of money. I brought my brother because he’s a pretty big guy. The plan was for him to beat the crap out of anyone in scrubs or a surgical mask if he heard me yell our predetermined secret emergency phrase (”It’s a trap! Kill those fuckers!”).

So the receptionist seated us in the waiting area with several other nervous people and their designated drivers. This was oddly uncomfortable because we were all pretty much forced to watch Wedding Crashers while we waited. If you’re not familiar, Wedding Crashers is a mildly profane film featuring the sex-crazed antics of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, including protracted scenes of laxative-induced diarrhea and Vince Vaughn very narrowly escaping homosexual rape. In other words, this is not the type of film you would expect to view in a doctor’s office seated next to a prudish-looking old woman whom you’ve never met. It’s the type of film you’d expect to view at a frat house seated next to an empty keg.

“But you only had to put up with the discomfort of it for a few minutes, right?” you might ask.

“You silly, ignorant bastard,” I might reply.

No, we saw the whole thing. Pretty sure my brother saw it twice. We were in the waiting room forever. Now maybe I had this vision in my mind of the whole laser beam thing being like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones zapping people in the eyes in Men in Black — ZAP! “You’re done!” — but 90 minutes seems like a really long time to wait for something you really don’t wanna do in the first place. Too much time to reconsider, ya know? Plus, when I’m handing someone $3,000 for an elective procedure, I expect a certain measure of respect and special treatment; not to be herded into a room with a bunch of strangers to watch a couple guys trying to boink Rachel McAdams.

But just when I started to get really pissed, it was my turn.

To be continued…

Tags: lasik, prk, laser eye surgery, wedding crashers