I had Lasik surgery this past Friday and I am going to tell you all about it. Because that’s what I do.

I’ll go ahead and say I was not overly nervous about the procedure. I mean, I was definitely nervous – they were going to be shooting laser beams into my eyeballs, after all – but I wasn’t all that worried about it. I wasn’t afraid anything would go wrong or it wouldn’t work. I was just concerned about the recovery time and the actual results.

I think part of my serenity about the whole thing came from the sheer volume of people I know who have had Lasik. Everybody said it was miraculous and everybody agreed it was the best thing they had ever done. Everybody also had a successful procedure. A couple of people wear glasses to read or drive, but overall they all agree their lives are better.

I arrived at the Woolfson Eye Institute just before 1 PM to find a waiting room full of people. I knew there would be other people having the procedure at the same time as me, but I had not known how many to expect. Everybody had said it was like an assembly line and that turned out to be very true.

They tell you beforehand to plan on spending three hours at the clinic. This is not for the procedure. The procedure itself lasts about seven minutes. Well – that’s not even true. It probably lasts about seven minutes from the time you walk into the operating room to the time you leave. The actual procedure takes about three minutes. The rest of your time at the clinic is devoted to a final pre-op eye exam and the application of about 732 different eye drops.

Mrs. Troublemaker was my ride. She hung in there as long as she could, but she gets bored easily (it’s a good thing I’m so exciting) and left to go spend some money after about an hour. Around that time they brought me back to one of the examination rooms to draw on my eyeballs.

This was a portion of the process that I was not prepared for.

If you’ve been to the eye doctor you know about the one device that has the chin rest and the forehead rest and a little mirror that swings from side to side so the doctor can shine the brightest light in the world into your eyes and see your brain. If your brain shrieks and shrivels up into the back of your skull, your eyes are fine. If it doesn’t respond, you might need better glasses. Usually they only shine this light into your eyes for a couple of seconds, but when they are going to be drawing on your eyeballs they need longer. And it’s pretty awful.

They had put 526 or so different drops in my eyes by this time, so they were already a bit sensitive. When they set me up in the little apparatus and turned that light on it was brutal. The lady told me she was going to draw reference points on my eyes. No big deal. Just fucking do it and get me away from that light. So she did the first one on my right eye and it wasn’t that bad. I could sort of feel it, but it wasn’t much worse than putting a contact lens in. Then she drew a second one on my right eye, the first one on my left, and then she got all frowny and did something I did not care for: she leaned off to the side and shook the pen. Like you do when a pen starts to run dry. Except this was not a fucking Bic, this was my own personal, special eyeball-marking pen that should have no reason whatsoever to be out of ink. But she shook the thing out and went back and re-drew the first dot on my left eye and then made a second one on the other side of my iris. And I must say – she was bearing down a bit. Like you do with a pen that is running out of ink.

That damn light was on this whole time as well.

The lady then frowned again and said that a doctor would be in soon and might redraw the dots if he didn’t like them.

What the fuck do you mean, “If he doesn’t like them!?!” I didn’t say. This lady was supposed to be a professional-caliber eyeball dotter. This was not something to be left to amateurs. If there was even a chance her eyeball dotting skills were sub-par then she should really be monitoring the temperature and freshness of sliced and fried potato products at the local fast foodery.

But whatever. The doctor would be coming in to check out her work. I certainly hoped he wouldn’t need to erase anything, though.

I have never in my life spent less time waiting for a doctor. Usually when somebody tells you the doctor will be right in, they mean that if you’re lucky you might see them in fifteen or twenty minutes. As long as they make it back from the golf course or their power lunch or whatever in time. This time around the doctor walked in the room pretty much as soon as the incompetent eyeball dotter left. The doctor was the cool Middle Eastern guy that I had spoken to at my original consultation. He took a look at my eye dots and sure enough had to redraw them. But he was quick about it. They looked like this:

Fucking crazy, right?

After that was done they put a bunch more drops in and sent me out to the waiting room.

Not long after that they turned me over to the financial lady.

I am not a huge fan of financial specialists in medical fields. They tend to be assholes. Now, I understand that they are assholes because they have to deal with patients that don’t want to pay and insurance companies that resend the same three forms nine hundred times before paying ; but I can’t stand it when somebody is preset to “asshole” before I even get to them. The financial lady at my dentist office is like that and it’s even more jarring there because the rest of the staff is so pleasant. Well, except for this one hygienist that talks at you like you’re three. I’d like to kick her.

So anyway, I went to pay my bill.

Lasik is not cheap and since it’s elective insurance covers jack/shit of the cost. Thankfully I have an FSA option at work so I had already arranged to have the money held out for that. I chose this year to do it because it is the last year you will be able to use your FSA to pay for elective surgery thanks to certain healthcare legislation that I’m not going to get into because I don’t do politics here.

But this financial lady was a real sweetheart – probably because she doesn’t have to deal with insurance companies. She even offered me pizza and cookies and soda. I declined because it’s almost time for Phantom Troublemaker’s insane-o diet. I’ve got to get into Dragon*Con shape so I can get measured for my costume (oh, this crazy-ass costume). This lady also set up my follow-up appointment for the following day. She asked what time I would like and I said the latest they had available. I am not a morning person. She asked if * AM was good. I laughed and then realized she was serious. She told me they were only taking appointments from 7:30 to 8:15. Damn. Then I paid the lady and then another person escorted me to a different waiting room where people were dressed very silly.

There were about six or seven folks sitting in there when I arrived and all but one had on these blue booties. I was directed to a chair by a guy that looked like a tiny Roger Moore, who gave me a zippered faux leather bag. I admit to being slightly more excited than I possibly should have been about the bag. But c’mon, man – this thing is pretty classy:

Tiny Roger Moore opened the bag up, pulled out a folded-up sheet of paper, and handed it to me. He then explained in the quietest voice you could imagine that these were the post-care procedures and that they had to be followed precisely. Also in the bag were two containers of lubricating eye drops (more eye drops, yay!), a small roll of medical tape and two transparent circles that looked kind of like Spider-Man’s eyes. I immediately noted a reference to sunglasses on the piece of paper and noticed that there were no sunglasses in my little bag. As excited as I was about the little bag, the thought of free sunglasses was almost too much for me to bear. Never mind the thousands of dollars I had just signed over to these people.

After one more patient came into the room, Tiny Roger Moore began cleaning our eyelids and applying more eye drops. I am not exaggerating about the eye drops, people. I think one more drop and my body would have surpassed the critical sixty percent point and they would have had to carry me out of there in a bucket.

The eyelid cleaning was very weird. Tiny Roger Moore was very quiet and gentle; almost reverent. I will admit to feeling blasphemously Jesus-like as he swabbed my closed lids. You should really have your eyelids cleaned sometime. It’s pretty great.

Then Doctor Woolfson came in, and he was a hoot.

Physically he was somewhat reminiscent of Kurt Fuller (Russell from Wayne’s World), but his demeanor was very much like Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Basterds. His accent only… uh… accents this. The man was very charming and witty and is clearly doing his best to both be practical and put you at ease.

Let me pause for a moment to talk about how stupid people are so you can truly appreciate Doctor Woolfson’s Q&A session.

Let’s start with me. If I am told not to pursue any physical activity after my very expensive, life-changing procedure; I am going to sit on the couch all weekend. If I am told to wear protective eyewear for two days afterwards I am going to do so every second of that forty-eight hours. Don’t get water in your eyes – I’m not showering. Don’t drive – okay. Don’t juggle knives – fine. Walk on your tiptoes until Monday morning – whatever you say, Doc.

So here are some of the questions Doctor Woolfson had to field after clearly stating the above rules (except for the tiptoes thing – he did say not to juggle knives):

“Do I have to wear the eyewear in the shower?”

“Can I take the eyewear off when I play with my kids?” (concerned her kids would mess up the protective eyewear!)

“Do I need to use the drops you said to use tonight before I go to bed tonight before I go to bed?”

“Can I drive here in the morning?”

With each of these inquiries, the esteemed doctor managed to keep his cool, level attitude. He responded with pretty much the same answer each time – “Just imagine my irritating voice in the back of your head saying, ‘No, no; do not do that.’”

Eventually he grew tired of fielding dumb questions and accepted that people were going to play racquetball and spray battery acid into their brand-new eyes if they wanted to and there was nothing he could do about it. At that point he left us and went to the operating room.

All this time I had been noticing that three of us did not have blue booties over our shoes or the attractive blue shower cap that everybody else had. I think Doctor Woolfson noticed too, because he spoke a few words to Tiny Roger Moore before leaving and the smaller man quickly distributed little rolls of blue fabric to the rest of us. We also got little green dots on our foreheads that stated what sort of procedure we were having. High-tech, that was.

I don’t want to be any meaner than I already have been about any of my fellow patients, but some folks were not handling shit as well as I was. One guy complained about every new set of eye drops we got. Another guy was pretty mean to his wife. This one little redhead apparently passed out while they were drawing on her eyeballs, so I really wonder how she did with the actual surgery.

This one lady was there with her husband, who had had the procedure about ten years ago. He was one of those insufferable windbags who is instantly an expert on anything that he has an even periphery experience with. The guy went so far as to try and horn in on Doctor Woolfson’s Q&A.

Okay, so a few people were ahead of me. They would go in, you’d hear all kinds of clicking and whirring, and then the door would open and you’d see this dazed individual sit up and have their picture taken with Doctor Woolfson. They had this deal where you were entered to win an iPad 2 if you let them put the picture up on their Facebook page. Naturally everybody signed up. I even signed up and I have an abnormal aversion to Apple products.

As patients went in to undergo the procedure, new ones would come into the waiting room. At one point these two black ladies came in. One of them caught sight of the interior of the operating room and said, “Oh, lawd, it look like Frankenstein’s laboratory in there!” So I told her to just wait until she met the doctor and that would really complete the scenario.

Eventually it was my turn. I went into the operating room and a nurse told me to lay down on the table. It was a wacky person-shaped thing that was sort of mad-scientist-looking. I laid down and put my head in the head-thing and relaxed. They swung the table underneath this big piece of machinery and the doctor told me to relax and asked me how I was doing. I was fine and told him so. I was ready to get it done.

If you’ve seen A Clockwork Orange, then you know what the device looks like that they use to hold your eyelids open. The doctor stuck one of those in my right eye. No big deal. Not comfortable, but not too bad. He then got this cup thing and started to put it on my eyeball. He told me there would be a little pressure, then more, and there was. This was probably the most unpleasant part of the operation.

I can’t tell you everything that happened next as far as what Doctor Woolfson was actually doing, but I can describe what I felt and saw.

Once the cup was in place, I saw a sort of swab thing go over my eye. He told me to focus on a blinking red light housed in some machinery. Then a tool of some sort moved from one side of my eye to the other. Another swab, then it was visually apparent that he was folding down a flap of my eyeball. He asked again if I was okay and I was. The he started shooting lasers into my eyeball. It was very much like the finale of the laser show at Stone Mountain, but right there in my eyeball. I could smell burning flesh (or eyeball goop, whatever) and could see the lasers. The amazing thing was that my vision was improving as it happened. The machinery around the blinking red light was becoming clearer as the lasers did their thing. Then the lasers and the burning smell stopped and I could see my little eye flap get smoothed back into place. Another swab, and the doctor pulled the cup out of my eye and removed the lid holder. He quickly moved the bandage over my left eye to my right.

The process was exactly the same for my left eye, except that I had a far greater urge to close my eye this time around. Obviously I couldn’t, but I wanted to. I had no problem focusing on the blinking red light and keeping my eyeball still, though.

Once the left eyeball was buttoned up and swabbed, Doctor Woolfson removed the bandage from the right one and the nurse swung the table out from under the apparatus. I was told to sit up and take a look at the clock on the wall and it was absolutely amazing.

My eyesight previous to the surgery was bad to the point where I could not have told you if the thing on the wall was a clock or a cat stapled to the wall. Now I could actually tell you the time on the clock. Everything was blurry, but I could see. There would have been tears pouring out of my eyes even if that weren’t already a side-effect of the procedure.

The nurse gave me the sunglasses I had been so worried about and Tiny Roger Moore came in with his iPad 2 and took my picture with Doctor Woolfson – which I struck my usual pose for, though I did keep my tongue in my mouth. Doctor Woolfson was amused. He was also amused when I thanked him about fifty times in the twenty seconds it took me to be escorted out of the room into the hallway.

There were three chairs in the hall and the girl that had gone before me was sitting in one of them, crying. And not just shedding tears, she was upset. I figured the procedure must have been particularly traumatic for her. I could get that. It didn’t bother me, but I can totally understand where some people might have a real problem with what had happened. I would find out later that she hadn’t had a problem with the surgery, but with paying attention beforehand. We’ll get to that.

For now, let’s talk about that iPad. I have already told the story of the first time I ever used an iPhone. It could have been humiliating, but wasn’t. Tiny Roger Moore came over and quietly explained that he was going to have me log into my Facebook account so I could post the picture to the Woolfson page (don’t worry – he cleared out my login info afterwards). This was a bit of a struggle because I couldn’t really see anything close up and also because the iPad has a stupid keyboard setup that I was not familiar with. And also because when you hit the button for caps the letters do not change to caps, so you can’t really tell that you are typing caps. It’s super-dumb. But I struggled through and logged in and got it done. At one point the girl said, “Oh, you’re having trouble seeing too?” and I replied that I was but they had told us a bunch of times beforehand that we would. For days.

Eventually they took her off to the front and I sat there and did my best to do stuff with my phone. I called Mrs. Troublemaker and she asked if I could see. I told her I could and she said, “Good! Then you can see all the stuff I bought!”

Finally they saw fit to let me go. I wandered outside and looked for Mrs. Troublemaker’s vehicle, realizing as I walked across the wet sidewalk that I still had my blue booties on. I stopped to remove them and then found the car.

By this time my eyes were watering like mad and just seemed to want to stay shut. It was weird, they were just physically going closed on me. But I was so hungry I had to get some food and I did not even care about eating decently. So we went to Five Guys Burgers, so called because a single burger with fries is enough to feed five guys. And this is the first thing I read clearly with my very own eyes:

I think the burger was all the more delicious for that.

Evil had texted me earlier to see if I wanted to do a little post-op beer drinking and that seemed like a great idea. He wouldn’t be over until later, so I went home, taped my Spider-Man eyes onto my head, and went to sleep. That was a heck of a sleep.

I got up around nine and hung out with the family for a bit. Evil showed up a little while later and we had several adult beverages and discussed the mysteries of life. And watched Enter the Ninja, which is a kickass movie.

I managed to get up on time the next morning. We got to the clinic and almost as soon as I got into the waiting room they called me back. Another Middle Eastern doctor checked me out. He had to ask if they had done both of my eyes. Apparently my right eye was already healed. Everything was good and I was right where I should be. I was probably in and out of that appointment in fifteen minutes. Nice.

Oh, I forgot to mention that in the short time I was in the waiting room with some other folks a lady explained what had happened with the girl before me. Apparently she hadn’t heard any of the times when Doctor Woolfson and Tiny Roger Moore had told us we might have trouble reading for a while. So when she was asked to use the iPad and couldn’t see it she freaked out.

I spent the rest of the weekend hanging out with Lil’ Troublemaker, watching movies and TV. And sleeping. A lot. It seemed like every time I slept my vision got a little better. I didn’t shower all weekend out of fear of a drop of water flying into my eye. I also kept either the sunglasses or the Spidey eyes on at all times.

I woke up this morning, took off the Spidey eyes, and for the first time ever shaved without corrective lenses of any kind. I can’t believe how much easier it was. I could see my whole face with no problem. I didn’t have to do anything weird with my eyes to see under my beard. I was super-careful in the shower. I kept the sunglasses on even though I was supposed to be good without them.

It was weird driving and even weirder stopping in Walmart to get some cereal.

There’s still a slight haze around bright things and things are blurry if they’re less than ten inches from my eyes. But that’s to be expected. My sight should stabilize within four to six weeks, but possibly not for six months. I’m cool. It’s good now. If it gets even a little better I’ll be thrilled.

-Phantom