Eye Fry, Part Two (Surgery)

Prepping for surgery was easy. I started taking eye drops every few hours in the couple days before surgery. I think they were antibiotics. Then on the morning of the surgery, my wife dropped me off at the doctor's office and went to have breakfast with the kids.

I put on a hair net and a gown, then went through most of the same eye exam procedures as I did during the consultation. But there was one difference: at the end I stared at a device that showed various red geometric shapes. I'm pretty sure it was a laser bouncing off my eye; it looked like a very uninspired laser light show, but with Muzak instead of Pink Floyd playing in the background.

At this point I realized the significance of something I'd been seeing while in the waiting room: every 15 minutes or so Dr. Hyver would walk into this room and take a floppy disk into the operating room. I deduced that the floppy disk contained eye-burning instructions specific to each patient. For a moment I found this unsettling. What if he set it next to someone else's disk and then picked up the wrong one? What if the write-protect got flipped by mistake and I got zapped with the last guy's profile? This wasn't like Taco Bell where an off-by-one error means you get a 7-Layer Burrito instead of a Chalupa. But after some thought, I decided it was probably no more unreliable than any other method as long as (a) there were information embedded in each file identifying the patient, and (b) the file had integrity-checking data. Moreover, having the data on a physical token like a floppy disk probably prevented certain kinds of bugs that might affect a networked system. Anyway, I had enough to worry about already, so I put it out of my mind.

Next I was on the table. Lots and lots of eye drops, lots of swabbing of iodine. Dr. Hyver told me to stare at a blinking light above me and not move my eye. Then he put a thing on my eye that looked like a big ring, and as far as I could tell stepped on the ring with his foot and jammed his entire leg into my eye socket. It didn't hurt, but it really felt like he was squashing a grape that I happened to use for seeing. He then announced in a booming voice: "I NOW HAVE CONTROL OF THE EYEBALL." My vision dimmed, then went completely blank. (I think this is actually an interesting side effect of the motion-based physiology of our vision; if your eye ever stops moving completely, your brain basically figures you're idle and turns on the screensaver.)

Dr. Hyver narrated what was about to happen in perfect detail throughout the entire procedure. He didn't specifically talk about the leg in the socket, but he did mention something about pressure. So though some of this sounds scary, actually none of it was surprising.

Next Dr. Hyver put the slicer on me. This is a little robot that makes deli-thin slices of your eyeball, leaving a flap that folds out and leaves the juicy interior of your cornea exposed. They do this because during the laser process they actually burn off some of the inside of the cornea rather than the top. Then they can fold the flap back and use it as a natural (and transparent) Band-Aid. Quicker healing and no interruption in vision. If only we could arrange all our scrapes, cuts, and burns so elegantly.

Off came the robot and the ring, and I could see again. Dr. Hyver folded back the flap and things were pretty blurry (even more so than my usual bad vision). Then he fired up the laser and told me to keep looking at the light. I heard dozens of quick arcing electrical sounds and smelled what I now know to be the smell of vaporizing eyeball. This part took about 20 seconds. Then more eye drops, flap replaced, and more eye drops. I could see, but things were still really blurry.

Next eye: same experience. Then they walked me over to a chair and let me sit for a bit. I could already see better, but it was like good vision through Vaseline -- hints of sharpness through overall murkiness.

One of the assistants called Mary on the phone to say I was done, and they gave me some very dark glasses as well as a bag of other stuff. They let me walk out by myself to the car.

Part Three next.