OmegaMom

Tangent:  I’ve written before how certain songs just yank me right back into an emotional state/gestalt memory of where I was and what I was feeling at a particular time.  "I can see clearly now" places me in freshman year in high school, eating lunch in the extra classroom that was used as a lunchroom in Small Private School, eating canned tuna salad.  BLAM.  I am there, immersed in a flash from the past.

At which point, I take a moment to turn to OmegaGranny and tell her, in all seriousness, "Ma.  Ma, I hated that canned tuna salad you sent for lunch for me.  Sorry!"  It was made with sweet pickles!  Ack!  I hate sweet pickles.  Sweet pickles are a blight upon the surface of human gastronomy.

I am also immediately a gawky, plump teen with pimples, shy and lonely and reading a book, both because I love to read and because I don’t want to have to interact with any of the other students.

Ahem.

This post is supposed to be about LASIK.  I meant to write it eons ago, just on general principles.  Then I meant to write it because Blog Antagonist was thinking about LASIK and wanted experiences.  Then I meant to write it when Mutha was also on the brink of LASIK.  So, now that SpaceMom is getting down & dirty with the idea of LASIK, and having proclaimed to all and sundry that it’s on my list of blog-posts-to-do, here it is.

Procrastination, thy name is OmegaMom.  I did manage to comment on everyone’s "I’m-thinking-about-it" post.  Does that count, in terms of procrastination-fighting karma?

Anyway.  In fourth or fifth grade, my teacher sent a note home with me for my parents.  The note essentially said, Kate is very good at arithmetic and answers all the math problems correctly, but there’s a slight problem:  Even though she sits in the front row in the class, the math problems she copies down from the blackboard are not the correct math problems.  Maybe you should get her eyes checked?  Mom promptly took me off to an optometrist, I emerged with eyeglasses very similar to these, though with thicker brown frames, and every year or two thereafter I would trek off to the optometrist again to get a new prescription, each time with thicker lenses.  Somewhere along the line, the lenses were so heavy that I switched to plastic lenses, and even those were heavy enough so that I had an ongoing blister/sore behind my left ear and red blotches on either side of my nose from the weight.

I got to the point where my eyesight was something on the order of 20-600; I could see at 20 feet what most people saw at 600 feet.  Take my glasses off and the world around me was like a soft-focus acid trip.  Especially on an interstate highway at night–whoa, that was really kewl.  I hasten to add that I never did that when I was driving, it was when someone else was driving.  All those semi-trucks lit up with fifty kazillion driving lights?  They would turn into whizzing shadows covered with pretty spherical blobs of sparkling colors.  It was neat.  What was not so neat was being unable to see the time on the clock when I woke up, being only able to "see" people if they were a foot away from me, and going in constant fear that my glasses would fall off my nose as I crossed the street, be crushed by a passing taxicab, and I would be, in essence, blind as a bat until I could replace them.

Somewhere along the line, Great Grandma said she’d pay for radial keratotomy if I wanted it.

I thought about it seriously.  But.  Um.  Someone sticking a scalpel into my eyes?  My one and only pair of eyes?  Making slashes like darts so my eyeballs would smush?  And…leaving those slashes open?  Um?  Just what would happen if someone was tossing a softball around, and my non-sporty-self somehow managed to get my slashed-eyebally-head in the right place to get a softball square on my eyebone?  Wouldn’t the innards of my eyeballs go splurt?  My response could be categorized as a shudder.  But the thought of not having to wear the Instruments of Torture was quite tantalizing, so I parlayed the offer into getting soft contacts instead.

Then LASIK appeared and was approved for use in the U.S. around 1990.  Now Great Grandma had two options to pester me about.  And since my soft contacts had suddenly stopped working quite as well and I was back to eyeglasses, which she thought were unattractive, pester me she did.

Sometime in late 1997, I decided to really investigate LASIK.  It had been around long enough for studies to have been performed, and long-term follow-up to show any real problems.  Being a geeky gal who already was used to researching things on the intertubes, I got onto PubMed and pulled up all the info I could find on LASIK.  The more I read, the better I felt about it.  And there were no squicky scalpels or incisions or eyeball-goo-squishing-out-of-the-eyes-when-whapped-by-a-softball worries.

So I called up Great Grandma and said, "Eep!  Yes!  I want to do it!"

Tomorrow:  In which I end up looking like something from The Fly.