LASIK Eye Surgery

Ever since I could remember I've been hampered with the hindrance of eyeglasses or contacts. Well, first eyeglasses, then contacts, and then when I started to wear each pair of disposable contacts for three to four weeks nonstop and a disgusting mucus started to come pus-ing out of my eyelids I had to switch back to glasses again... But NO MORE!!! Thanks to modern science and Flash Gordon technology I am now fully free from the shackles of extra-vehicular eye support. I got me some Lasik done! Yeehaw, motherfuckers!

Wow! Just the whole idea of Lasik is impressive. For those of you who don't read much or are stupid, in Lasik surgery the doctor uses a veeeery tiny razor to cut a flap in the cornea of your eye. He/she then flips the flap back and lasers the shit out of your inner cornea to a custom prescription... Who the fuck was the first person to volunteer for this operation? You sir, are one brave mo' fo'.

I'm actually really amazed at my own ballsack right now. See, despite me actually putting in and taking out contact lenses for a good 11 years of my life, I am a total pussy when it comes to anything having to do with "eyes". Touching them, damaging them, spitting milk through them (I swear to God that I saw some kid do this once in my high school cafeteria... The Wolfman and Chi-Chi can back me up)... Man, my older brother could always get me to run away, screaming like a little faggy girl just by either flipping his eyelids inside out, or by opening his eye reeeeeally wide and touching the side of his eyeball with his index finger (for even bigger shrieks he'd push his eyeball in and out a little bit). The point is I freak the fuck out when it comes to human optics (Honestly, when I first started wearing contacts it took me close to an hour to put them in... Which is why I started leaving them in for up to a month, it just saved me all that trouble). So, when I made my decision to get some Lasik done, I did so quickly and fastly. I made the appointment and had everything done within a week. It's like doing a cannonball into a cold pool. Once you throw yourself into the air like that you can't stop the momentum and you can't turn back. And although the shock of hitting the freezing water is pretty harsh, you settle down and get used to it pretty quickly, and then you can make fun of all the other pansies who haven't even dipped their toes in yet. The only problem is that your balls may turn blue and shrivel up a bit. But there's a price to everything.

Speaking of "price", I called up one of the many expensive eye doctors in Atlanta who do this laser shit (it's my fucking EYES, man! Ain't no way I was going to trust one of those "$200 an eye" advertised-in-the-entertainment-section-of-the-newspaper doctors!) and set an appointment. My regular optics doc in town then dilated the hell out of my ojos and did some pre-op scanning and checking for God only knows what. And seriously, my eyes were fully fucking dilated for over 36 goddamn hours! That's just horseshit! But it allowed me to continue on my vision quest, so I forgave the ratfuck bastard..... 36 hours of wearing Stevie Wonder shades over my glasses!!! Uuuuurgh!! I looked so fucking retarded. I'm just thankful that I only hang around even more retarded people for just such an emergency.

Soon my day under the microscopic knife was at hand. I got Big D to drive me to the swanky doctor's office, and then got right to work. Mostly filling out a TON of forms stating stuff like "I will not sue the doctor if my vision does not turn out to be 20/20," and "I will not sue the doctor if the laser accidentally fucks up my eye and I have to wear an eyepatch for the rest of my life," and finally "I will not sue the doctor if he anally rapes me while I am mildly sedated in the operating room, or if he mildly sedates my girlfriend and anally rapes her in front of me after he fixes my eyes so that I can see him anally raping her without the aid of glasses." After calling Karen and making sure she was safe at home with the doors locked I signed the last form and was then ushered into a fancy office in the back where two large orderlies pinned me down and surgically removed my credit card from my wallet. Then they anally raped my credit line to kingdom come. My card is still walking funny...

After I was forced to pay for the operation, they were nice enough to give me a Valium (Valium is the drug of choice for the gods on Mt. Olympus... Just as soothing as alcohol, just none of the hangover). I turned to the guy who gave me the pill and asked him what effect a simple 5mg of Valium would actually do for me. He looked at me and said, "Hmm, you're around 6'4", 6'5"?... about 190 to 200 pounds?...That'll probably only be like 2 beers when it kicks in." I then said, "Hey, there's a fiver in it for you if you can make it a 12 pack." He chuckled a bit, took the bill, but then he only gave me a 10mg pill to chase the original with. Eh, it was better than nothing, and I got the money from Jimmy Jammer the day before when I found his pants in my office when I came back from lunch. The Valium made me not care about that thought too, so it was well worth the money paid.

Then the guy took me to a dark room and Waveprinted me. Nothing that disgusting, he just laser-scanned the back of my eyeball with some weird light that acted like that laser effect in that T2 preview where the laser would wiz across the screen leaving behind text like "Ten years ago, they sent the ultimate killing machine to the past to kill Sarah Conner... They failed... Now, they're trying to kill her SON!" Awesome.

So that Scanjet thing mapped out my eye so that the good doc could precisely and with precision mold my cornea into perfect 20/15 vision (what I begged him for) with only a 75% chance (give or take a half a percent) of a major fuck up. Unless he was on Valium too, in which case neither of us would have really cared all that much anyway until things wore off. The scan printout itself was pretty cool, it was all in color and it looked just like how the Predator would probably see the human eyeball. It was all in reds, yellows, oranges and greens in almost a Rorschach test kind of image. Wow! Two Arnold references in one review! I'm on a roll!

The data from the scanning was fed into the Lasik computer (I'm assuming... I mean, why else take the scan if it wasn't going to be. Unless it's just a weird hobby of the doctor. New Age art? I'm rambling again), and I was given a quick eye-chart test right before some numbing drops were poured into my eyes. Then I was forced to put on a blue, paper, grandma showercap and matching shoe guards. The shoe guards let me do the moon walk really cool like, but the nurses just started calling me a pervert when I started grabbing my crotch and yelling "Oooo-Hoooo!"

I was then shoved into a cold room with a large, comfy-looking folding chair in the middle and a huge computer-machine, like something out of The Matrix, next to it. Then somebody took my glasses and the world went all fuzzy. REALLY fuzzy. My prescription was something like -4.25 in one eye and -20K in the other. Anything more than 3 inches away from my face without my glasses turns into a kaleidoscope of light and blurs. The machine, from what I can remember (I was on 6 drinks of Valium on an empty stomach and with veeery relaxed eyes after all) came up from the ground and had something like an arm protruding from it that was able to swivel to above the head rest of the chair when it was fully collapsed. I started to tense up a bit when I saw the unfeeling machine, but the doctor and his large black assistant kept me moving and pretty much strapped me down to the chair. At least that's what it felt like happened. I don't really recall if the chair even had straps, just that I couldn't move once seated in it and lowered with it into the full-back position. Before I knew it the two of them pried my right eye open, propped it as wide as it would go with what I could only guess was that Clockwork Orange device they used on Malcolm McDowell, and began pouring lots of liquids all over my field of vision. My left eye had a patch over it, but it had tons of holes in it like a colander. Yes, I know how to cook spaghetti... I actually know what a colander is. Bite me. I was distracted from my thoughts on spaghetti at that time though cause the doctor told me to "stare at the light directly above your right eye. Never take your eye off that red light!" That red light became my new lover. My eye began fucking that red light. I was never going to let that gorgeous red goddamn light out of my sight ever again! But then my right eye went black. Blind. I blurted out, "Holy shit! You fucking blinded me! What the fuck?! Lawsuit!!" But the doctor reassured me with, "that's just natural. Keep your eyes open for the red light again when your vision returns." Well, that really wasn't a reassurance, but my sight did return moments later, though I could barely even make out that luscious red light, and then the popping began.

Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! The assistant kept calling out time, counting backwards from 26 seconds, intermitting telling me that I was "doing great! You're a champ! Keep it up, tiger!" Apparently I looked like a 7 year old Special Olympics contender to him, I don't know. But before I knew it he had reached "3, 2, 1... Aaaand we're done!" and the popping sound stopped. The doctor then started watering my eyeball even more than before, and the weirdest visual sensation I had ever experienced then occurred. The doc must have resecured my eyeflap, as he was pushing down on my eye and moving it around and shit, so, despite the fact I was still trying to focus on the fuckable red light, my vision was shooting every which way in the O.R., yet I felt nothing. It was like a private movie camera was plugged directly into my eye with somebody else directing my vision. Very strange. And let me repeat, no sensation at all. Weird.

Before I knew it they had removed all of the utensils from my right eye and pulled the eyepatch off of my left. Then they repeated the process vice versa. But before they got too far on doing anything major to my left eye I noticed something rather wrong. "Um, doc," I said in a very sweet but concerned voice, "Umm, I can still feel shit on my left eye. Please make it not hurt." He just chuckled and said, "Oh ho ho ho... The LEFT eye is just more sensitive than the right...." and then some other stuff which for some reason made perfect sense at the time. He was kind enough to pour some more of that magical numbing liquid all over my exposed visual organ right before cutting into it though. It probably would have truly sucked if he didn't. Like having a really bad paper cut right on your fucking eyeball while you just lie there and take it. Yum.

My left eye took three seconds more to zap than my right, but by now I was an old pro at staring at that rated X red light directly above me. My eye ravaged the living shit out of that light. That light was my bitch that day. Oh yeah.

When the countdown for ol' lefty reached zero, the doc and assistant began to put it all back together again. But I happened to notice (as the doctor was pushing some sort of surgical utensil INTO MY EYE) that they seemed to have a bit of trouble getting the flap or something to lay down correctly. It was taking the good doctor a looooong time and lots of pushing on my eyeball. I finally got the nerve up to ask, "Everything all right there? You're, uhhh, pushing on my eye a lot, aren't you, doc?" He just waved it off and said that he simply wanted the corneal flap to be perfect, and since I did too I just let the man work. Soon all was right with the world and they began dismantling the equipment that was in and around my ojos, and I could immediately see shit on the far side of the room that I couldn't even make the general shape out of right before the op. The universe came into focus. Everything was still very hazy, and light BURRRRRRNED a little, but I could see!

They took me into a dark room after that, gave me one more Valium (Yay!) and then told me to close my eyes for about 10 minutes. I faded in and out for a while, and after ten minutes apparently passed by the doctor came in the room and told me to open my eyes. I complied, and then proceeded to open and close each eye individually to see if either was better or worse than the other. The doc just stopped with his mouth open and looked at me in disbelief before telling me, "Yeah, don't do that." After that I have vague memory snippets of me being walked to the car, a quick flash of the ride home, and I think I remember climbing into bed with those really annoying goggles on my face (to keep me from scratching my eyes out like an old dog with the mange?). The next thing I knew it was the next morning. My vision was already perfect! I went to my local eye doctor and found out that I now had even better vision than I had with the use of my glasses! I was at 20/15 (meaning I could now see something at 20 feet that the average person can see at 15... moron).

Since then my vision has fluctuated a bit, but my last eye doctor visit showed that I am still right about 20/15. And I never have to poke my eyes out with contacts ever again. Never have to pop on a pair of glasses to drive my car, see my alarm clock, or read a sign farther than 3 inches from my face. I just have to keep pumping antibiotics and lubricants into my eyes for the next six months, but who doesn't? I am free, and I am lovin' every minute of it!

So, what do I think of having my eyes sliced, zapped and then mended into ocular perfection? I give the whole LASIK experience 4 out of 4 Eyes of Freedom. Enduring Freedom. What I think is funniest is whenever anybody asks me how much the whole thing cost, I just respond, "Well, let's just say there goes the 'Engagement Ring Fund'." Karen doesn't think it's that funny though.

Well, I suppose this is all "high tech" and whatnot in the Rossman's time, but where I'm from we usually "gene zap" all of our newborn children in order to make sure that they are all perfect specimens of the human race and not genejokes. Those who do not survive the heavy radiation from the gene zap are turned into food. Not for us humans, you sick and disturbed primitives, but for our dogs and robots. They just love irradiated baby.

I believe that this is the best that bio-technology enhancements can do for one in your day and age, and so for that, I suppose it is a good start. I give this Lasik a 21 laser gun salute. Keep splicing those genes, scientists!

I was thinking that maybe I should get this eye Lasik thing done too and get rid of these contact lenses. I'm not sure, but I think the Rossman has his retarded friend, Kuni, pee in my contact containers when I'm at work. I mean, I had a camera set up in my house at one time to catch whoever kept breaking into my place while they were in the act, but... Well, ummm, never mind.

Someday, soon, this will all come to an end and the Rossman will die. Horribly. No remorse from me. Just like that dog I ran over and over last week.