With his eyes, the man can see (kind of)

In preparation to have his eyes lasered yesterday, Mike had to quit wearing his contacts about a week and a half ago. Unfortunately, he had lost his glasses so he had to buy new ones. Doesn’t he look so hansom??

He was supposed to have LASIK. But, the plan changed on Monday.

He went for his pre-op appointment and they found some weaknesses in his cornea that caused the doctor to decide that he was not a good candidate for LASIK specifically. Instead, he had PRK.

Don't know the difference? Let me put it this way... PRK, what he had done, has a longer recovery period and hurts worse during recovery.

Let me see if I can explain it just a little.

In the LASIK procedure, the doctor has a laser that cuts a flap of the cornea and then takes out some of the corneal material, puts the flap back and it heals just like a cut on your skin would... kind of like a paper cut. Most people with this procedure have 20/20 vision and are driving the next day.

However, with the weaknesses in M's cornea, the doctor didn't want to make those cuts down into his cornea. So that changed his option to PRK.

In this procedure, the laser "scrapes" the corneal material from the outside of the eye. The end result should eventually be the same, but the healing process is a lot longer as it's kind of like an open wound. As the cornea heals itself and grows a new outer layer of “skin,” his vision will be very cloudy for a while. He has to wear protective lenses in his eyes and use tons of different drops and even has a Vicodin prescription to help with the pain. His best, clearest vision won't come for about 8 weeks.

I took him to the eye place on Friday, he got checked in and I waited with him for a few minutes. Then, since we were close-by, I was going to make a run to Costco and come back to pick him up.

He called to say that he was done and judging by my reaction, he guessed that I hadn’t even checked out at Costco yet. I later had to come clean that I had not been to Costco at all.

I went to dress barn to look at skirts (insert obligatory animal noises here). Oh, I wasn’t going to try on anything. It was going to be a quick pass-through just to see what they had, and then it was on to Costco. But the denim skirts…. They were callin’ my name!

So, I picked him up and he was wearing these terribly fashionable sunglasses.

The first thing out of his mouth?

“That’s the weirdest thing I have ever done.”

He began to describe everything that they did. At one point he said, “I remember thinking, ‘Donna would not handle this well.’”

I have a thing with my eyes. Nobody goes near them. People messing with my eyes freaks me out.

He has had to help me get boulders of sand out of my eye before. And he has witnessed me getting an eye exam. So he has personal experience with this freakishness of mine.

But, this post is not about me…

He said that he could see absolutely clearly as soon as he sat up from the procedure. And all evening long he kept calling out to me things he could see. It’s pretty amazing for him.

With his natural vision, he can’t even see the big E on the eye chart. As he puts it, “If I lived in caveman days, I’d have been dead long ago. I’d have been eaten by a saber tooth tiger. But on the upside, I’d have never seen him coming.”

So, even though things are cloudy right now, he says that, “If my vision never gets better than this right now, it’s still such a vast improvement over what it was that I could live with that.”

I took him for a follow-up this morning and he’ll have another one on Tuesday before he will be released to drive. His right eye had been bothering him some and the doctor put some drops in that dilated his eyes again, but helped tremendously. He also has quite the arsenal of drops here at the house that he uses almost hourly.

Mike says now, “Oh, I love me some drops!”

But the Trail Mix... it's mine.