Yesterday I had my LASIK appointment. I'll go ahead and ruin the suspense: I'm not blind.

The whole thing happened very quickly. I showed up, put my signature on a consent form and an uncomfortably large Amex receipt, and was whisked back in to the first of two staging areas. A woman named Zoya walked me through the contents of of my postoperative kit:

No rubbing your eyes, keep your eyes shut in the shower, don't wear eye makeup — "accidentally" saying this is apparently Zoya's little joke to the male patients, and when I didn't say anything she had to stop and point out how funny her gaffe was. Sorry for missing my cue, Zoya. I guess you don't get a lot of patients who're Cure fans.

As you can see, the kit contains instructions, some Tylenol PM for the postoperative nap, a slightly nicer pair of shitty sunglasses than the last one, steroid & antibiotic eyedrops, some artificial tears, and a totally awesome transparent mask for sleeping. I like to imagine it makes me look like Richard Hamilton, but so far the only real feedback I have is Charles bursting into laughter when I stumbled to the kitchen without taking it off.

Eventually I was whisked to a new antechamber. This one had all of the doctor's degrees in it, along with his various awards (which consisted exclusively of testaments to how many thousands of patients he had treated). The idea was clearly to set the patient at ease, if only by awing him with the facility's framing budget. But hey, the doc went to UVA for both undergrad and med school! Alright! It was good to know that any potential eye mutilation would come at the hands of a guy who's thrown up in the same places I have.

But the most fascinating part of the room was this:

Presumably setting 10 is only used for particularly severe medical emergencies.

Eventually the doctor came in, brimming with self confidence. He prompted me for questions — I'd already asked his staff everything I really wanted to know, but after my first query he said "alright, that was a good one! C'mon, gimme another", I felt I ought to comply. Then he said, "Alright buddy, let's go knock this thing out." He was very Top Gun. In other contexts this kind of guy would've bugged the hell out of me, but here I found it weirdly comforting. I guess I want American Supermen to be the ones manning lasers of all sorts. Even if they're pointed at my eyeballs.

So, the actual operation. At this point I'd been well-briefed, so there weren't many surprises. And the doctor narrated everything, which was also reassuring. They put in some drops, then some more. They taped one eye shut, then taped my other eye's lashes down to keep it open. Then some sort of wire device went in to really keep it open. It wasn't particularly uncomfortable, though, and everything happened too close to my eye for me to be able to see how evil-looking the tool was.

Then something else went on there — I don't know if this was the keratome or just something to hold my eye in place. But the doctor said for the nurse to turn the suction on, and I started to feel pressure (strangely, it felt like much more pressure for the second eye — the doctor said this was common). Then everything went dim. It was a fairly unsettling effect, but the alternative would have been worse, because this was when they made the corneal flap. There was a whirring, then the suction was turned off. Vision returned, blurrily. Then the doctor moved the flap out of the way, making things much, much blurrier.

At this point the blinking red light that I'd been told to train my sight on took up about half of my visual field, and it was hard to know whether to just keep my eye still, focusing on the part where I was looking, or to try to center on its middle. I settled for the former as the laser went off, and the doctor seemed satisfied enough.

This was the critical part, I guess, because the doctor's narration sped up. "Focus on the light, focus on the light, ignore the smell, focus on the light..."

Ignore the smell? What smell? Oh, right: the smell of BURNING EYEBALL. Note: scent analysis reveals that eyeballs are made out of hair.

Then it was over. They put the flap back and told me to close my eye. A shield was taped over the eye. And then they did the same thing for the other one.

A quick post-op check on the flaps' positions, and then Charles gave me a ride home. Needless to say, everything looked weird. The effect was like looking through lightly frosted glass. There were hints of new sharpness, but the halo effect coming off every light source made it hard to make anything out.

Things are better today, but it'll be a while longer before my vision completely settles down. Right now I still see a fairly strong halo effect coming off of all illumination sources (and yeah, I know it may persist to some extent). It's kind of like living inside a Barbara Walters special.

The worst part was waking up about 4 hours into an 8-hour dose of Tylenol PM when my neighbor decided to start lathing some metal (apparently). My eyes were hard to open, they hurt, and I felt like hell. Things were better once I got some more sleep, though.

So, complications? Nothing too bad. My eyes started feeling a little itchy about an hour ago. I mentioned the halo thing. And I'm pretty sensitive to light. Oh, and there's this:

But they say if I just stick with the ruby quartz eyedrops everything will work out.