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There are industries built around cheating
time, some geared at health, others vanity. They haven’t profited much from me,
being largely content to keep my cash in my pocket and my body as it is. Still
I have worried about my eyesight in recent years. Not that I had much to begin
with; I long feared someone would think to start charging for glasses by the
pound.
The photos accompanying this
column have always been without specs. I was flirting with contact lenses when
the first was taken, then doffed my glasses for the last to spare myself another
sitting if I went ahead with the laser surgery I was considering. I may have
looked like I had 20/20 vision, but I was actually dependent on some pretty
serious corrective lenses.
While the changes in my vision
have slowed, I suspected my next prescription might be for a seeing-eye dog. I
don’t even know where you’d get one. Does Lenscrafters carry German shepherds?
OK I exaggerate, but only a
little. I could read at six inches but not be certain how many fingers my
doctor held up at six feet, or even whether he had fingers. So after years of
fretting, I began to get serious about surgery.
I know several people who have
had LASIK, short for laser in-situ keratomileusis, which is short for having the
lens of your eye stripped back and your cornea shaved. The patients I spoke
with claimed there was little pain, had a quick recovery, and raved about the
results. Yet the notion of allowing my eyes to be peeled like a couple of
grapes gave me the creeps.
It took weeks to talk myself into it, during
which I drove my wife nuts. Once she walked in while I was watching a science
fiction program on television; on the screen, a man strapped to a chair
convulsed wildly as beams of light crashed into his face, an attempt to undo a
nasty bit of alien mind surgery.
“What on earth are you watching?” she asked.
“Oh, just a documentary on LASIK. What do you
think?”
Too kind to answer, she rolled her eyes and
walked off. She does that a lot.
She warmed up when I explained I would have to
keep my eyes closed for 24 hours afterward. “Hah!” she gloated. “You’ll be at
my mercy!”
“I’m already at your mercy,” I corrected.
“Yeah,” she recovered, “but you’ll have to eat
whatever I feed you.”
“I always eat whatever you feed me,” I noted.
Defeated by her own success, she relented.
The doctor explained that I had deep-set eyes
with small pupils (polite talk for “sunken” and “beady”), but would be a good
candidate. I learned he had operated on rats while helping develop the
procedure, so would be just the right guy.
It has been almost a month and it’s been
great. I last tested 20/15 in one eye, 20/25 in the other, and 20/15 combined.
I use reading glasses for small print and low light, but am enjoying the best
vision I ever had.
It has nonetheless been an adjustment. I
hadn’t lost my glasses in 20 years because I couldn’t get far enough away to
lose them; I now misplace my reading glasses regularly. I am unaccustomed to
the wind in my eyes, constantly adjust glasses that aren’t there, and reach for
them in the morning. Overall, though, I am a satisfied customer.
One day, I know, the world will dim again.
Hopefully not for many years and not too badly, however I learned long ago that
the quest for permanence in the here and now is futile. I find mine elsewhere,
but am happy for the moment to marvel at the mundane, magnificent gift of
sight.
© 1997- 2002 Brent Morrison
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