Laser Day

Personal essay, 2015

Originally published in Medium.

Three years ago I opted to get LASIK surgery, a decision that will go down in the top ten best moves I ever made, falling somewhere between moving in with my then-girlfriend/now-wife Becca in the summer of 2008 and the steak fajita burrito I bought ten minutes ago from Chipotle that I’m wolfing down as I write this. (Seriously, I can barely hold onto this thing. Its juices are dripping all over the keyboard. I’m weeping at its glory.)

In truth, I was getting by just fine before the surgery. I’d been wearing contact lenses since junior high, and my vision was perfectly fine with those. I also owned a pair of chic, thick-rimmed hipster glasses that carried the added benefit of making me appear thoughtful and sensitive as I sat in local coffee shops pretending to read books. On a practical level, my decision to get LASIK was economically sound, which my accountant father would doubtlessly applaud: I was paying a high upfront cost now (average price in 2012 was $2,092 per eye), so that I would no longer have to pay smaller costs spread out over several years (I had been buying “daily lenses,” which are like $600 a year, not including the annual eye exam required to maintain the prescription, and none of which my crappy insurance covered).

But there was something almost philosophical about the decision, which I only appreciated after the fact. What LASIK, Becca, and this gorgeous burrito have in common: they’re all choices that made my life objectively, demonstrably better by actually solving the problem, rather than just slapping Band-Aids on the symptoms forever — saving me from blindness, loneliness, and starvation, respectively. (Okay, maybe not the burrito. Although calorically, Chipotle meals do have the strength of two meals.) This sort of thing runs counter to my usual lazy-ass strategy of employing half-measures to ameliorate my sorry, meager existence until things are just good enough to get by. I was choosing to truly see the world with greater clarity, rather than just sliding plastic sheets over my eyes every day to make it seem clearer.

If you, yourself, are considering LASIK — well, that’s a personal choice, and though I’m a satisfied customer giving it two thumbs up, I would never presume to tell you what to do with your eyeballs. This essay is not a piece of persuasion, and I’m not here to shill for Big Laser with a sneaky “advertorial” and phony endorsement. (I mean, I would shill for them. If someone from the LASIK lobby wants to get in touch with me, I’m totes available & very cheap.) I simply wrote this to share one piece of my personal experience with you: the way LASIK surgery terrified me to the core.

Before I go any further, I should explain what LASIK is, how it works, and what it does. But I’m not a goddamn scientist, so most of this section comes from educated-guessing and conjecture. According to Wikipedia, LASIK stands for Laser-Assisted in situ Keratomileusis. In situ is a Latin phrase that means “in position” and I know this because “in situ cooking” is a fancy way of describing a chef who arrives on site and prepares a meal using what she finds there, as opposed to preparing the meal at her restaurant beforehand and bringing it with her, or hauling the ingredients and cooking apparatuses to the location (i.e. a caterer). So if Guy Fieri shows up in your kitchen and whips up a quick-and-dirty nacho dish using some Doritos he found under your couch and a can of Cheez Whiz from the back of your fridge, you can dial 911 and say “Help! Guy Fieri broke into my house! And he proceeded to do some unauthorized in situ cooking!” (I’m not a chef either, nor a Latin scholar, and I may be making this up.)

Now, your eyeball is like a camera lens: it bends and focuses light in a way that I am incapable of explaining. The cornea, specifically, is the lens part. The word “cornea” comes from the medieval Latin phrase cornea tela which means “horny tissue,” haha. If the shape of your cornea is all screwed up like mine was, then the world looks blurry, out-of-focus, distorted. Depression can do that to you, too, but that’s an essay for another day.

This leaves you with two options: bend the light before it reaches your eye, using glasses or contact lenses, or reshape the cornea itself by shooting laser beams at it to remove some corneal tissue, which doesn’t sound safe at all.

That unsafe nightmare option is LASIK.

One of the reasons I’m so hazy on the science of laser eye correction is that I wasn’t really listening when the surgeon explained this all to me, which I gather he’s required by law to do. When I first came in to see Dr. Laserbeams (I have since forgotten his name; I disliked him, he was an asshole), he gave me a quick eye exam to see if my corneas were laser-able enough to qualify, then handed me a waiver that was several pages long, detailing some truly gruesome but rare side effects of the procedure. I took out a pen to sign it, but he said I had to take it home and think it over. I shimmied along in this kabuki dance of lawsuit indemnity, turned in the paperwork 48 hours later, secured the earliest possible appointment the receptionist would allow, and called in sick to work. It wasn’t that I was excited to get LASIK so much as I was anxious to get it over with.

How I came to afford this costly elective surgery was: one of my relatives had died of old age, and he left me something like ten thousand dollars(!) in his will. A funny story about that inheritance: near the end of his life, this particular relative had started hoarding gold, an obsession that seemed to augur the onset of dementia — that is, until the global financial crisis sent gold prices soaring, retroactively making him a savvy investor indeed. While the thought of spending this fortunate windfall on shaving my corneas made me queasy, I resolved to just do it without thinking any further, then blow the rest of the cash on a fabulous new wardrobe. I bought so many peacoats, I lost count.

The day before the surgery, panic set in. I’m not sure where it came from, but an intense fear swept over me hard and fast. There was a rising sense of dread that wasn’t attached to anything real, and an unjustified certainty that some imminent, unnamable, irreversible bodily harm was fast approaching, which manifested as an all-consuming state of terror. At the risk of sounding needlessly melodramatic or macabre, the experience of processing these over the-top emotions and irrational fears was the closest I’ve ever come to contemplating my own mortality in a serious, sustained way. In other words, I sort of felt like I was literally going to die.

Of course, I wasn’t actually going to die, and the millions of people who have faced life-threatening medical operations should each have a turn slapping some sense into me. But I’m not talking about reality, in which the risk of severe LASIK complications is minimal, and at worst I’d be blind, not dead. I’m talking about the rocky shores of my inner emotional world, in which nothing can ever be controlled or explained, where a violent tempest we might call Tropical Storm Scared Shitless was ebbing and swelling inside me.

The panic had something to do with getting a stark reminder of my body’s inherent fragility, like finding a blotch on your skin that might be cancerous, though you’re pretty sure it’s just a mole, or waiting for the results of an HIV test you had no reason to take in the first place. It doesn’t matter if the worst case scenario is the most remote, unlikely outcome. Fear can be a tiny speck in reality and still loom large in your mind.

At this point in the story — where I’m lying awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, tormented by calamities that will never occur — I want to take a brief interlude and insist that I’m not usually this guy. I’m not the worrying type, I have very few persistent fears (except cockroaches, yikes!), and I’m not scared of death. In fact, one weird thing about me is that I find the idea of death comforting, even beautiful. Like the existence of God in the Abrahamic faiths, death is the one absolute certainty in the universe I can rely on, an inviolable truth in a world of uncertainty. Even atheists can believe in death.

I’d enthusiastically support the return of memento mori and vanitas in art — symbolic reminders of the transient nature of life, the inevitability of dying, and the quasi-nihilist conclusion that all earthly struggle is therefore futile and meaningless, so we should all chill out a bit. But there’s a sharp difference between romanticizing a state of non-existence in the abstract and feeling like the end is tomorrow. Death is the ultimate Monet, in the words of Cher from Clueless: far away, it’s okay, but up close, it’s a big ol’ mess.

This dark night of the soul subsided by morning, and I entered an entirely different phase. On “Laser Day,” as I was calling it in my head, everything still had a certain edge to it, but there was a lightness, too. The clothes I picked out felt especially elegant in the light of day. Every song on my iPod sounded lively and fun. My roommates, normally a source of endless petty frustrations, were a delight to see. My grisly panic had blossomed into a warm thankfulness.

I grabbed breakfast at the café by my apartment and watched people on the street come and go. Small snippets of other people’s mornings took on an unusual immediacy for me, and I found myself recording images in my mind that would otherwise never have struck me as special or worth remembering: a five-year-old boy in a bright blue raincoat sprinting away from his mother and baby sister, running to pet an exhausted-looking dog leashed to a traffic pole; a delivery guy on a bicycle with one foot on the curb, checking his phone and smiling at some private news he received; a man and a woman exiting a cab, both frowning, the woman with her arms crossed, the man explaining something in a frustrated tone of voice; a pair of middle-aged guys sitting on the bench outside, sipping steaming coffee out of Styrofoam cups and chatting at the slow, leisurely tempo usually reserved for the weekend. It occurred to me that if I did happen to die suddenly, the rest of the world would keep on going, largely unfazed. That’s an obvious, intuitive fact — one guy’s last day is just another guy’s Tuesday — but it means something different when you’re sympathizing with the first guy. Moreover, if the surgery got botched and I happened to go blind as a result, this might literally be the last day I’d ever see. I soaked it in just in case, trying to memorize all the colors, hoping I could take them with me.

I had this weird desire for dignity, too, even when I was alone in the elevator. As I pushed through the glass doors of Dr. Laserbeams and Associates, I tried to walk tall and remain composed. I sat in the waiting room with my hands folded in my lap, foregoing the cheerful issue of Cosmopolitan magazine that beckoned from the side table — an otherwise unthinkable act of abnegation and self-restraint, as if Laser Day was too sacred to be spent ogling Celebs Who Look Amazing Without Makeup. (Plus, I had read that same issue at my previous appointment. Sienna Miller did indeed amaze.) I surrounded myself with an air of solemnity, hanging thick and gross like a cloud of Axe Body Spray. It made me reflect on all the times I had faked this kind of somber gravity for the sake of the occasion, like my fraternity initiation ceremony, with all its empty gestures toward seriousness.

When I was finally prepped and ready to be lasered, a lab assistant gave me some squishy stress balls to hold during the procedure, which I promptly squeezed into little stress pancakes. He asked if everything was okay. I said, “I’m nervous, but ready. Let’s not talk any more. Just do it.”

Despite all this gratuitous hand-wringing and my overwrought sense of fear, the truth is that LASIK is a relatively short procedure, like 60 seconds per eye, and is almost painless. I say “almost” because the ocular specula, which I believe is the nasty medical term for the things that clamp your eyes open (sounds to me like a bloodthirsty creature with bulbous eyes and spindly spider legs), hurt like hell. And when someone holds your eyelids open, like in the torture scenes in A Clockwork Orange, you go into a primal state of alarm as a voice in your head (rightfully) screams “what do you think you’re doing?!”

During the procedure, I was awake the whole time. While I’d rather not revisit the surgery itself too much, I do want to mention that there was a blinking light at the center of the machine, and my theory was that the light had nothing to do with the laser. It was just there to distract me, give me something to focus on. I couldn’t see the laser beams themselves (they’re invisible), but while they were doing their thing, I did actually see my vision shift slightly as the corneal tissue got reshaped and reformed.

My vision before LASIK was so bad I was practically blind without glasses. My visual acuity was exceedingly worse than 20/200, and my contact lens prescription was somewhere near negative seven. When an optometrist would give me that eye chart test with the descending block letters (which also has a gross name: the “Snellen chart”), I couldn’t even see the damn thing. I’d have to ask, “Where is the test? Have we started yet?”

But after I healed from LASIK, which was swift, by the way, and smoothed over by a boatload of Oxycodone, my vision was miraculously close to 20/20. Today, I can clearly make out faces and signage and faraway objects and tiny details on the tops of buildings in ways I didn’t even know was possible.

It’s not quite “perfect vision,” and my eyes are still terrible in other ways. For instance, separate from my nearsightedness, I happen to also have a rare degenerative condition that causes tiny cholesterol crystals to form and accumulate in the vitreous of my eyes, so it’s like there’s a tiny snowglobe going on in my field of vision at all times. I’ve learned to ignore it, so I hardly notice any more. One doctor called it synchysis scintillans, but I think that’s a dog disease? In any case, the point is that LASIK surgery worked for me, and by embracing the simple choice to go through with it, I was able to make my day-to-day life significantly better. It’s a relief to have the daily hassle of eye care removed from my mornings entirely, and to no longer worry about smashing my glasses by accidentally sitting on them.

This seems remarkable to me since there are so many other Sisyphean curses that will nag us till we die: we have to clothe ourselves, bathe ourselves, shave our uncooperative body hair, and continually make Sunday brunch plans with our most boring friends, ugh. But while scientists have yet to find a way to laser-graft clothing onto us permanently, or laser-off all our bodily germs for good, or harness the power of lasers to tame our unruly hairlines (wait, scratch that one), they have found a laser cure for poor eyesight. Because of Laser Day, I will never again have to deal with objects more than three inches away from my face receding into an infinite, unknowable blur.