I can recommend eye surgery to anybody thinking of giving
it a try: it's a barrel of good times.
This morning I was able to take the eye-patch off and see with my miraculous new vision. It was deliciously exciting: for the first half-hour or so, before my brain got used to it again, my whole house stood out in vivid, even exaggerated, 3D — like those magic-eye pictures that used to be popular. I mooned about the house with a stupid grin on my face: “oh look at that bottle it's in front of that other bottle! Bwaaa haha!” etc.
The procedure itself, on Monday, was a breeze. Firstly, nurses rock. Seriously. Nurses are just ace. If you are a nurse then you have my good opinion and if you know any nurses you can tell them from me that I think they're lovely. It's all about blankets: they just looooove giving you blankets. If you want to pamper a lad just give him some blankets and then inject some sedatives into his arm. Secondly, unlike the dentist, say, where you have to jack your own jaw open and breath through your nose and forbid yourself from swallowing and so on — and I still struggle with that — you don't have to do anything once your eye is anaesthetised. You don't have to keep your other eye closed or stop yourself blinking or anything: I was naïvely thinking I might have to do something of the kind.
The actual anaesthesia I mentioned might have been a bit of a test of nerves, though: two needles directly into your eyesocket either side of the eyeball. The staff there, however, didn't seem to make much of a fuss about it and I was all relaxed with my blankets and my sedative so I was perfectly happy.
The procedure involves cutting a small slit along the side of the eye, inserting a probe that chops up the lens of the eye, inserting another probe that sucks the bits out and then sliding in a plastic lens and I was able to watch it all from the inside! Very blurrily, of course, but I thought it was interesting.
Took today off work and spent the afternoon relaxing and just looking at things. Oh yeah, car coming up the street, I see you. Yes book, I'm reading you. Yeehah!
It wasn't cheap though. That private health insurance stuff is actually some pretty cool shit.
¶ 8:40 pm
Good to have you back in the world of vision Harpo.
My sister is truly phobic about all things nasty around eyes - I'm tempted to send this to her just to creep her out.
PS blokes not the only gender impressed with blankets/sedatives in combination. Just wish I didn't have to undergo eye surgery as an excuse....
My thanks to both of you.
Dan
: 11/5/07 08:04both you and Gigglewick have implied that I've told a gruesome tale — it honestly didn't seem like that to me at the time. I was quite happy to let the ophthalmologist fiddle with whatever he felt was necessary and I'm quite used, after many years of it, to having nurses poking me with needles and crap.
But now that I roll the words around my mouth: “three injections right next to the eye… three injections right next to the eye” I start to feel disturbances in my suavity. “A probe like a little blender liquifies your human lens…” oh yeah. I'm starting to see what you're talking about here.
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