The Surgery- Left Eye

OK, here comes the fun part. The surgery. Let me preface it by reiterating a key piece of information. A complicating factor to all of this is that I have Amblyopia. This is also called "lazy eye," despite the fact that people use "lazy eye" to describe any of several other conditions. What it means is that, as a child, I had a muscular imbalance that led my right eye to dominate, where my left eye basically started to deteriorate. If left untreated, I would probably be blind in my left eye. To treat this, you wear a patch over your "good" eye, to make the "bad" eye work (though "bad" and "good" are all relative when your prescription is as bad as mine is). I would wear the patch in the evening for a few hours, watching TV from about two feet away, and holding a book up to my nose. It was fun. But basically, your eyes stop developing by about six years old, so once that age passed, it was set and I didn't have to wear the patch any more.

Anyway, to this day my left eye only corrects to about 20/40. It's hard to describe, but the world looks clear, though there is no power behind it. I can see the edge of a sign clearly, but I can't read the words. It's weird. Anyway, my surgeon mentioned that they don't typically do surgery on people with this condition, because if by some chance your "good" eye becomes damaged, you're pretty much screwed. However, my surgeon seemed to believe that my amblyopia is slight, so away we go.

The reason I mention this is because the surgeon decided to operate on my left eye first. This way, if I have an adverse reaction to the whole thing, it's on my "bad" eye anyway. So though the procedure is done, it's hard to know how things will really end up until my "good" eye is done in a few weeks. But this is all preliminary. Let's get to the good stuff.

I arrived at the surgical center about an hour before the scheduled surgery. The waiting room was filled with senior citizens ready for cataract surgery. I felt very out of place, and I'm sure my wife did too. This unsettled feeling was complicated by the fact that the man sitting next to me sounded exactly like Boomhauer from "King of the Hill" and acted like he'd never been in a doctor's office before. Anyway.

In preparation for the surgery, I had to put a drop in my eye every half hour to dilate my pupil. I'm sure I looked quite odd. After a few minutes they called me in and had me wash my face, and then laid me down on a stretcher and put a nice warm blanket over me. Very cozy. A nurse then put an incredible series of drops in my eye, and started an IV in my hand. Apparently the next person they were supposed to operate on was having an issue, so I heard "well, Matt's dilated so let's get him in." They then put some numbing gel in my eye, and started rolling me, presumably to the operating room.

My surgeon suddenly showed up and wanted to see my eye, and then the anesthesiologist poked his head into my field of view (of course, I was staring at the ceiling) and started talking to me and asking me about my job. I hope the sedative isn't also a truth serum, because I don't know exactly what I said to him. I do remember saying "did you put the stuff in, because the lights are moving." He said yes. Good. I'm not going crazy.

Then came the surgery, and at this point it got kind of fuzzy. I remember some pressure in my eye, and I think I remember some very small pinpricks of pain. But that could be the drugs talking. I do remember the doctor telling me to keep my right eye open- I guess when it closed it was making the left eye squint. It seemed very fast- I think ten minutes tops. I think when it was done they let me fall asleep, because the next thing I remembered was sitting up in the stretcher in another room with the nurse putting in some drops and writing some stuff down. My surgeon came in and told me everything went great, and to ask who was with me. I think I said "my wife, in the green jacket." Fortunately, he brought her in, because the nurse went through a litany of instructions, not all of which I'm sure I understood.

Five or ten minutes later, I got up and we left. No big deal at all. I was a bit shaky, but put my coat on and got to the car with little difficulty. We decided to go get lunch nearby, and then we had to go to the surgeon's office a couple of miles away to get my pressure checked, to make sure it wasn't spiking. At lunch I called my parents, who seemed very surprised that I was even coherent, and that everything had gone so quickly.

So how was I seeing? Pretty well, considering that my eye was still completely dilated. On the way home, I could tell that the correction was right, even though there was a haze around everything from the dilation. Getting the right prescription had been my biggest worry.

So all in all, everything seemed fine. In a separate post (this one is too long already) I'll tell you about how things felt that day and the next, what I have to do treatment wise, and some of the aftereffects. But I'm sure you're tired of reading this now...