Eyeballs and Lasers

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

Sometimes good results can be had by going against conventional wisdom and common sense. Moldy French cheese, for example. Bleu cheese was probably made by accident the first time, but some adventurous soul figured out that, not only does mould cheese not kill you, it tastes pretty good on salads.

In the upcountry area of Thailand, called Isaan, they've figured out that if you do absolutely everything the FDA tells you not to do with meat, such as stuffing it raw into a severed bull scrotum with a bunch of herbs and hanging it in the sun for up to a month, you can still feed it to your friends. And, as long as they're from Isaan, you'll still have friends afterwards.

Aiming lasers at your eyeball is another one of those things that goes against common sense, but I went ahead and did it anyway. I paid a doctor $1,500 to vaporise parts of my cornea and presto! I can see.

I've been a slave to glasses and contacts since I was seven years old. My vision was so bad I wouldn't get out of bed without some kind of vision correction on my face. A whole section of my left temporal lobe is dedicated to remembering where my glasses are in the morning. This weekend I changed all that with some elective surgery.

After shopping around for eye doctors I settled on one that gave me the sternest warnings about how I was to prepare for LASIK, which I think stands for Laser Intracorneal Keratotomy. I found out later they don't use actual carrots.

The eye hospital wasn't the cheapest in town but they seemed the most thorough when talking me through the procedure. And who wants to be cheap about their eyesight? That said, the price was less than half what it was when I checked six years ago in the US.

"You Won't Feel a Thing"

Maybe it's just me, but local anaesthetics never seem to work. I can always feel dentist drills. And lasers.

Doctors who do eyeball surgery, or anything else for that matter, will tell all their patients that the procedure is painless. What people don't know is that, before graduating, doctors must all pass a course in bare-faced lying. Anyone with an ounce of sense will know that, no matter what they give you, cooking your eyeballs is going to hurt

I was stuck in a room for 30 minutes before the surgery while nurses put antiseptic eye drops and topical anaesthetics on my eyes. They may have been pretty nurses but I didn't have my glasses on at the time and later my eyes would be on fire.

I was brought into the operating theatre and laid out on a rotating table. The nurses tried a couple of times to attach a rubber sheet to the upper and lower eyelids of my right eye. When I say, "attach," I mean with actual tape. I guess one always uses tape to attach things, but it just seems a little weird to tape stuff to eyelids.

When they realised the moaning sounds I was making meant that I could still feel my eyes, they dumped some more anaesthetic in. When they realised that the anaesthetic wasn't working they went ahead with their taping anyway.

The doctor then took a metal clamp with four hooks and further prised open my eyelids. If I was to choose a proper word to describe that sensation it would be pain. Pain, combined with a sting and a deep, throbbing ache that went to the back of my head.

Of course, since all this was happening to my eyeball while I was awake, I could see it really well. It turns out that a wet swab applied directly to the surface of your eye isn't just a big brown blur. It looks very clearly like a giant wet sponge sliding across your vision.

They rotated me under the hulking machine and told me to focus on a red flashing light. After swabbing my eye, the doctor took a suction cup on the end of a long plastic tube, and pressed it against my eye. As an assistant counted off units of pressure (I think - this was all in Thai), the apparatus sucked at my eyeball. This was done either to make the cornea bulge out a bit for the next step, or just for some sick fun.

The doctor then fit a metal tripod over my eye to hold it in place and, using a tiny whirring saw, sliced a semi-circle across my cornea and peeled back the flap. At this point I was thinking, with the entirety of my being, "Eeeew."

I was still supposed to look at the flashing light and keep my head steady. I wasn't strapped in and if I had wanted to bolt out of there with my cornea flapping in the breeze, I could have. The flashing light was now a flashing blur since I was looking at it through half a cornea.

I clenched my teeth and stared at the red light while another, green, light came into view. The doctor said, "Here we go!" and a loud ratcheting sound filled the room.

I don't know which part of the operation was the yuckiest, but it was probably one of the things which now followed. When the laser hit my eye, I could see the red flashing blur slowly changing shape. Despite the fact I was still supposed to be numb, I could feel a stinging heat. I could distinctly hear a crackling sound as parts of my lense were vaporised, and I COULD SMELL MY EYEBALL COOKING.

For the overly curious, I can tell you a cooking eyeball smells a bit like a burning electrical cord.

They hit me four times with the laser, repeatedly telling me to remain perfectly still. Despite the obvious wisdom of this, I could barely manage it. I was fairly terrified by this point and I could feel an uncontrollable quivering starting in my spine.

Once they were finished with the laser, the doctor folded the flap of my cornea back in place and spent a really long two minutes smoothing it out with a swab. Despite the fact that I had been a whimpering baby, the doctor said I was doing well.

They took out the clamp and removed the plastic. They told me to close my eye very slowly and carefully, which was unimaginably difficult as I really wanted to scrunch my eyes up and shudder for a few hours while muttering the word, "yuck," over and over again.

They taped a plastic cup over my eye and I sat on the edge of the table for five minutes and shivered.

Then I laid back down to do the other eye.

Recovery

After making my way home by taxi with my eyes closed, I spent the rest of the day in blindness, warned against either opening my eyes or squeezing them tightly. They were really emphatic that I shouldn't squeeze my eyes. They didn't tell me why, and I didn't want to ask because I was sure they'd say it was because streams of goo would shoot out of my eye sockets if I did.

The next morning, I could open my eyes and, for the first time in my life, I could see without my glasses. Now, two days later, my vision is a little bleary due to the scar tissue on my corneas, and at night I can see giant halos around every light, but this is supposed to clear up in a week or so.

It's just about a miracle, really. A lot of stupid stuff is done with technology but laser eyeball surgery is pretty fantastic. And I never ever want to do it again.

Jeffrey Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon 23 in every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a publishing career.