Seeing Things Differently: My Laser Eye Surgery Story

Spot the difference.

Embracing the four-eyed life

I'd been wearing glasses for around twenty years, after a short-lived phase in early secondary school of 'forgetting' my pair in an effort to look cool. Somehow the penalty -- squinting in vain across the dining hall for familiar faces -- seemed worth it at the time. 

'You really need to wear these at all times,' my horrified optician scolded me after I casually revealed this. And so I came to terms with the fact that some things -- like seeing where I'm going -- should probably rank above others -- like whether my glasses clashed with my outfit. Eventually, I even grew to like my glasses, assimilating them into my style and routinely opting for their familiar comfort over the hassle and waste of contact lenses.

So when the time came to refresh my pair, which had -- quite literally -- seen me through multiple job and house moves, a postgraduate course and a pandemic, I took the task seriously. I spent hours combing through scores of pairs, considering how the slightest adjustment in size or shape would complement the contours of my face. I'd be wearing them almost every waking hour, after all, and I'd donned my current pair for longer than I could remember, so this was a ritual worth taking my time over. 

After whittling my search down to a shortlist of contenders, a wild thought occurred to me: 'Or I could just get my eyes lasered.' I dismissed the idea -- as I had countless times before -- almost immediately. The mere thought of bringing any kind of sharp implement into alignment with my eyeballs was enough to make them water. Learning to put in contacts had been ordeal enough, taking two eye-reddening trips to the optician to master, and then only after having finessed the manoeuvre to avoid touching the eye itself as much as possible.
   
As decisive as ever, I set aside the final choice of frames for later. Soon after, I stumbled on a laser eye success story online. 'I don't know why I didn't do it sooner,' the author wrote, accompanied by a grinning, glasses-free photo of them scaling the Cumbrian hills. They made it sound easy. It did look tantalisingly freeing to be able to participate in physical activities -- in all manner of weather conditions -- unencumbered by glasses. Plus, it would be nice not to have to wipe off a regenerative film of dust and grease from my lenses every five minutes. And the author's experience -- of putting something rewarding off, possibly after working that thing up in their head to the point of paralyzing terror -- felt familiar. Still, I thought. I couldn't do it. 

Flirting with the unthinkable

The next morning, I looked up information about the procedure. Just out of curiosity. And who knows? Maybe if I learned more about it, the fear would diminish slightly. In this spirit, I then decided to watch a full SMILE keyhole procedure being performed on a patient (as I'd read this is the least invasive option and has the fastest recovery). Each eye, I discovered, only took a few minutes. If I can't sit through this, I've no business even thinking about this, I told myself. This turned out to be a mistake. 

The video reassured me that the procedure was pain-free, and the patient smiled serenely throughout, even though their eye was clamped open Clockwork Orange style. But the sight of the surgeon probing and scraping across what can only be described as the gelatinous surface of the patient's cornea for multiple eye-watering minutes was enough to make up my mind. No, nope, absolutely not.

I returned to my glasses search feeling slightly defeated but validated in my decision. This was my lot. And it wasn't such a bad one, I thought, as I considered the same glasses again admiringly. But somehow they'd lost some of their shine.

Down the rabbit hole

As these things have a way of doing, my true desire resurfaced -- in the shape of a dream. In it, I went through with the procedure. Like I'd read in all the online articles, it was over startlingly quickly. And immediately afterwards, I could see perfectly (less realistic, though many people experience instantly improved vision). That was so much easier than I thought, my dream self marvelled. It was as though my subconscious was telling me this was within my grasp. I awoke charged with a strange sense of renewed motivation.

Before taking any further steps, I interrogated my brother, who had successfully undergone LASEK several years ago, about his experience. Despite achieving better than 20/20 vision, his recovery process had been fairly rough, and he didn't spare me any unpleasant details*. During the procedure, his numbing eye drops hadn't been administered correctly, so he'd struggled to keep his eyes open and 'felt more than he should have'. Perhaps worse still, for years afterwards, he'd sometimes wake up to extremely dry eyes, causing intense irritation and watering. 'Think eyelids sticking,' he said, before adding brightly, 'The results were otherwise amazing, though.' 

His story had haunted me for years and, until this point, had been enough to put me off laser eye surgery for life. The thought of the anaesthesia failing is an instinctive fear that's followed me into dental appointments and an appendectomy, but one I'd told myself is just that -- an unfounded fear. However, though I hadn't read any similar accounts, hearing this from a source so close to home made it sound like a disconcerting possibility. 

But I knew that this was as logical as dwelling on a single negative comment in a sea of positive reviews (over 99% achieve 20/20 vision or better), and I'd researched enough to know that the procedure he'd chosen came with specific risks -- one of which was a longer recovery time and greater discomfort relative to LASIK, a more popular alternative. My experience didn't have to echo his, and he urged me to speak up if anything felt uncomfortable.

Only mildly deterred, I decided to press ahead with a consultation at Optical Express. I could always abandon the idea if the quote was too high or the prospect too daunting. Either way, I could put the matter to rest once and for all.

Setting the date

My consultation ended up lasting three hours. I answered a questionnaire about my lifestyle and expectations and underwent a few vision tests, but the bulk of the session consisted of conversation (and sharing of dog pics with the consultant, a fellow dog lover; if this was a ploy to put me at ease, it was a master touch). Unlike watching the procedure video, though, talking it through with an expert made me feel reassured -- or as reassured as I was ever going to feel about having my eyes zapped with lasers. Instead of coming to my own horrifying conclusions after watching a video of the procedure through my fingers, the consultant patiently explained each step and answered my endless questions.

The procedure would only take a few minutes per eye. The numbing drops would eliminate the blink reflex and any pain. As I qualified for LASIK, recovery would be fast, with most of the healing taking place within the first day, enabling me to return to my computer-based job after a couple of days. The answers were so reassuring, in fact, that a small part of me doubted them still. But by the end, I was left with few reasons NOT to press ahead besides apparently overblown fears and a faintly lingering attachment to my glasses and the young girl who'd started wearing them after deciding she didn't really care what anyone else thought.

Up until this point, I'd continued to tell myself this was all just theoretical; to come this far, I'd had to maintain this sense of distance, as if swathing everything in a veil to soften the edges. So I was in mild shock at my decision at the end of the consultation to book my surgery within the month. I opted for LASIK with iDesign, a special technology that captures your prescription more precisely. No more pretences or excuses. If I was going to do this, I wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible.

The intervening weeks were a strange anticipatory time during which I swung between moments of Zen-like calm and rippling panic. Some nights I lay half-awake, thoughts tiredly cycling through the imagined procedure. After watching a fireworks display on Bonfire Night, I couldn't help but wonder whether I'd ever see fireworks again. I shared the news about my decision with family and friends not just because this was a momentous and exciting development for me -- but also because I wanted to hold myself accountable. Telling others would make it harder for me to turn tail and run when the time came. 

The day of surgery

The big day soon arrived, but the waiting didn't end there. The clinic was bustling with others undergoing laser treatments too, and I had to wait around an hour to be called in, filmed in a cold sweat despite my winter layers. It felt like waiting to be called into a final exam. I watched as others re-emerged after a short time wearing sunglasses and smiling broadly as if they'd just had their hair cut or tan topped up. They made it look impossibly straightforward, and I couldn't reconcile the fear I felt with the knowledge that I'd be in their shoes soon enough.  

I was eventually called into another waiting room, and after a few more minutes met with my surgeon for a final briefing and to allow me to ask any final questions. Dr Erik is as close to a wizard as mortals come -- one of the world's leading ophthalmic surgeons, he'd performed over fifty thousand eye surgeries and spoke five languages. But in that moment, there was little that could've made me feel much better. I told him I was feeling nervous. 'The things we worry about rarely happen,' he reassured me in his precise Dutch accent, calmly appraising me over a pair of half-moon spectacles. 'It feels strange. But not so terrible.' I felt as though I'd been given a pep talk by Dumbledore's clean-shaven, scientifically inclined cousin. 

The sight of the laser apparatus looming by the bed in the procedure room stirred a nervous flurry in my stomach. What had I got myself into? 15 minutes. Just 15 minutes of my life in exchange for perfect vision, I recited to myself dryly. My nerves must have been palpable, as an assistant gave me a stress ball to squeeze. They talked me through each step as it happened in soothing tones, starting with administering the numbing eye drops.

I needn't have worried about this going awry. Despite my robust blink reflex, they managed to apply the drops in stages, giving them a few seconds to settle before applying further rounds to ensure my eyes were completely numb before proceeding. I barely felt the clamp as it was placed on the first eye, and, as I began to furiously pump my stress ball, I was instructed to focus on a dot on a screen while the first laser was activated. I could only keep track of it for so long before inky darkness spilled across everything, but I was told that this was fine.

I didn't feel any pain, only firm pressure for several seconds. This, they assured me, was the worst part. The surgeon then tinkered with my eye for a few minutes, occasionally blurring my vision with a mist of drops. Again, I didn't feel any pain, and I couldn't see enough to know what was happening, which was probably just as well; at most, I perhaps felt a light tickling. 

The second laser was then applied, and I could perceive it patterning across my eye, emitting a faint 'burning' smell, making me feel almost like an item being machined on a production line. This was followed by some final tinkering. Not so terrible, as the doctor had promised, but certainly strange and bewildering.   

The procedure was then repeated for the second eye. I must've been tensing my eye without realising it, as at one point I heard someone report that 'suction has been lost', but this was fine, too, and I was told to try to relax as a process was restarted. It seemed I couldn't really go wrong otherwise; even if I sneezed or turned my head, the machine, which used eye-tracking technology, would turn off automatically.

Amazingly, I never once felt the urge to blink, either, which had been a deep-seated fear. In fact, after the surgeon had finished fine-tuning one of my eyes, after all the strobing lights and blooming darkness, I could no longer even tell if it was open or closed.

The (short-ish) road to recovery

And just like that, it was over. Through the bleariness, I could already see distant details more clearly. I broke out into a small fit of uncontrollable shaking soon after, attempting to nod sagely through the tremors as a nurse ran me through my new hardcore eye drop regimen; perhaps it was shock or a runoff of excess adrenaline.

My shades-wearing re-entrance into the waiting room wasn't quite as slick as it had been for others, either; I began to feel faint after a few steps (probably from stress and reclining with my head angled slightly back) and had to lie down and be brought around with a bourbon biscuit, like the most British of damsels. Oh well.

I was advised to take some painkillers and a nap afterwards, but as the numbing drops began to wear off while I was driven home, the sensation was too strange and uncomfortable to ignore. For the next few hours I could barely open my eyes, shrinking back at the slightest hint of light like an infernal creature of the night. The consultant had likened the feeling to that from 'chopping lots of onions', so I was prepared for the non-stop streaming (if not the sneezing), but it felt more like my eyes had been blasted with microscopic grains of glass.

Thankfully, my partner had converted our house into a darkened vampire's den in preparation, and he patiently led me by the hand through it, curtains drawn and lights dimmed or swivelled away from my line of sight. He only needed to drape shrouds over the mirrors to complete the effect. Instead of sleeping, I listened to the gentle tones of Louis Theroux on BBC Sounds and waited to feel semi-normal again.   

Just when I was beginning to think this might never happen, after around four hours my eyes began to feel markedly less gritty, and I even managed to open them without hissing and shielding my face like Nosferatu. From then on, they continued to feel progressively better, and at my checkup the next day I was told my eyesight was better than 20/20 and I was even cleared to drive -- a truly remarkable turnaround. To lapse into the dramatic, the experience felt a little like being reborn -- emerging from darkness into light. 

Today

Three months on, and my life has improved in many small ways it's easy to take for granted: I've walked in the rain without my vision steaming up and nestled into my partner's shoulder without my glasses squashing into my face. I look forward to hiking and swimming and just feeling the sun on my face in the summer, like a girl in a period product ad. I still get dry eyes when I'm tired and glare from bright lights at night, but that's OK -- my vision is projected to improve further over the coming weeks and months. I also still sometimes reach for my glasses on my nightstand or make as though to adjust them on my nose; twenty-year-old habits are hard to break, and in some ways I still think of myself as a glasses wearer.

Things have changed but also stayed the same, and perhaps more than anything this experience has helped me appreciate what I already have -- the support of others around me: my mum, who prayed for my safety; my brother, who drove me to my first post-surgery checkup; my friend, who told me she thinks I'm beautiful with and without glasses; and my partner, who was so alert on the night of my surgery that he hardly let himself sleep, reflexively waking himself up to swat my hands away from rubbing my eyes whenever I moved (even though I wore protective goggles).

While it may seem like a minor thing to others, this also involved breaking through a huge wall of fear for me, and it's shown me that I'm capable of much more than I thought -- something I think I've always known but haven't always been able to see as clearly as I should.


*My other brother was kind enough to remind me of a certain Minority Report scene. Yes, that one. Thanks for the support, guys.

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