I just got back from my free LASIK evaluation at LASIKPlus. I chose them after a careful, two part evaluation:

1. Who is my health insurance compatible with?
2. Which laser center requires the least human contact to schedule an appointment?

A personal-interaction-free webform won LASIKPlus my business, and I headed down to Old Town this morning to begin fulfilling a lifelong desire to have lasers shot at me.

A tech named JT put me through the initial battery of tests. They flew by; the only other JT I've encountered was the simpleton cousin from Step By Step who turned out to be an alcoholic and domestic abuser in real life, and I was thinking too much about that to pay much attention to anything else.

The first thing they start to tell you about is the doctor, who you never meet until your 15-minute procedure. He's done thousands of procedures! People fly from all over the east coast to have him do their operation! He can tear a phone book in half! He projects the excimer beam from his eyes!

They're definitely ready and willing to put patients through a hard sell. The initial medical form contains stealth questions to aid them in this process. In between "what medications make you die?" and "has/have your eyeball(s) ever exploded?" they sneak in items like "what's the first thing you'll do after LASIK?" This is so that later, when the attractive female doctor has come in for final eyeball measurements and begun to discuss the $10,000/hr rate they earn for surgery, she can touch your arm and say, "Won't it be great to throw away your glasses/look at your grandchild/watch a beautiful sunset?"

I was feeling weirdly adversarial, so I left those questions blank. When she got to that part in the form I decline to answer, and instead asked some more questions, pretending like I knew what a diopter is. Also, I didn't buy any of the lines they fed me about me being "one of the best candidates they'd seen in quite a while". I suspect their criteria are largely credit-score-based.

But the one sweet nothing I do believe is this: I possess utter corneal dominance. "Monster corneas," JT said, and you could hear the quiet awe in his voice. The biggest he'd ever seen! That's right. If I accidentally fall through dimensions into a society with an ophthalmologically-based hierarchy, I'm going to be sitting pretty. Also, it's apparently good for LASIK, in case they fuck it up the first time.

Then they dialated my pupils. I hadn't really been planning on this.

Right now I look like an anime character with a serious coke problem. But even better were the sweet temporary shades they gave me for the ride home:

Yes, this is how you're supposed to wear them. They're basically just a curly piece of plastic that clings to your face. My pride made me consider trying for the Metro sans-shades, but it was just so goddamn bright out. Besides, my Alexandria friends were at work-slash-Vegas. I think I made it to the Metro station in relative anonymity. Apologies to the children I scared along the way.

Anyway, the upshot is that, after insurance, I'll be out $2500. I've got a very good shot at 20/20 and a reasonable expectation of better than that. My enormous pupils (which are apparently also bordering on the superhuman) make halo-effects at night a real possibility, but the doctor said that judging by my current incorrect and glare-free-free prescription, I was probably getting those already and just didn't notice or mind them. So I think I'll probably go through with it. I hate wearing glasses, and I've been talking about doing this for years. I'm pencilled in for May 13.

This is probably the part where you should tell me your LASIK horror stories.