New Eyes!

Dun dun duh dun! (like trumpets for a king) Matt and I got Lasik! We actually have been talking about it for quite a while and I had been putting off my next eye exam for way too long, so we just decided not to spend one more cent towards contacts or eye exams. It seems like a lot of money, (we paid $1800 an eye) but you just have to think of it as an upfront cheaper payment. If you do the math, $150 for an eye exam each year, $100-200 a year for contacts, (and mine are basically the most expensive because I have a astigmatism) then add in $500 glasses every few years it only takes 7-8 years to get your money back.

I have to admit, I was a little nervous. I mean its your EYES! But Matt and I checked with a few different places and finally settled on Hoopes Vision. We looked at Eye Institute of Utah, but they hadn't been doing Lasik very long, we checked at the Moran Eye Center, and heard that the main Doctor was great but that a lot of students actually do the surgeries. I am normally afraid of places that advertise a lot like Hoopes, but they were very professional and nice, plus they were just ranked one of the top eye centers in America for Lasik by Forbes AND they gave me a freshly baked hot cookie after my surgery.

The surgery itself went really well. Maybe I am retarded, but I really didn't know much about eyes before. Like the reason I couldn't see was that my eye was too curved, like a football rather than a ball. All they do with Lasik is just re-shape the outermost tissue layer of your eye, the cornea, with a laser. The process only takes 15 seconds to make the flap and 20 seconds to shape the eye. I honestly thought they would have to mess with the pupil or retna, I had no idea. So they just made a flap with the laser, then pulled it back and took a little tissue off the top (which kind of smelled like burning, gross!) and voila I could see! Oh wait.

So I did have one minor complication. Matt was seeing perfectly within about 12 hours, but my right eye is apparently challenged. My left was perfect the next morning, but my right eye was stinging and blood-shot and pretty blurry. So I went into my follow-up appointment pretty scared, but they said what had happened was the numbing drops had made some of the eye cells scuff off and it would just take a little longer to heal. So they gave me a bandage that is basically a contact to put in my eye and said that it just needed more time to heal.

The problem is that it is really hard to have perfect vision in one eye and blurry in the other. It was making me sick, so I patched my right eye (yep, and I said RRrrrr too) and then spent a lot of time watching movies that I knew really well so that I could just lay their with my eyes closed and listen. It was pretty funny for Matt to come home and see his patched-eyed wife laying on the couch with her eyes closed listening to a movie. Then the next challenge was that I was making cake balls for my sister-in-law's wedding shower and I couldn't pour the chocolate over them because the patch made me have no depth perception whatsoever. So Matt stepped in and made 75 percent of them. He is amazing.

All in all, things are fine now and I am really glad I did it. Another fun fact, did you know that your tear ducts are pretty closely connected to your throat, cause after taking so many eye drops, you can totally taste it in your mouth after. Weird ... and gross. Oh, and after I told my boss I got Lasik he said, oh yeah, I had noticed that your eyes looked irritated before when you wore contacts. Excuse me? Well at least now they will be pristine.