Into the Surgery Area – Surgery Day pt. 2

So after about 15 minutes of waiting in the little sitting area directly outside the surgery room, a nurse finally came to take me back. By this time my nerves were shot, even though I had been given a valium in the eye examination room where the antibiotic drops were applied to my eyes.

I want to start by saying that the surgery room, which I was given the opportunity to see before just not from the inside, was scary and only intensified my nervous feeling. It was basically a sterile looking version of a mad scientist’s lab or perhaps some sort of ultra clean torture chamber. There were two big ominous looking machines (one to cut the corneal flap, and one to make the tiny incisions on my exposed eye), multiple people in blue scrubs and white masks buzzing around yet somehow all staring at me at the same time, and a gurney type table that I was to lie on during the procedure. To me though, without my glasses, everything was a fuzzy blur and I felt scared and alone.

A rather cute nurse led me to the surgery table and instructed me to lie down. I was a bit unsteady at this point, partly due to the drugs – both taken internally and those dropped into my eyes, and partly due to my franticly racing nerves (not to mention that I physically couldn’t see because I wasn’t wearing my glasses) and so the nurse actually assisted me onto the operating table. She passed some more instructions to me along with a few soothing words like, “This will all be over before you know it” and “Don’t move while the laser is on”.

My breathing was really fast by this point and I don’t think the valium ever kicked in. It was as I was lying down, staring straight up at the ceiling, that I was given my stuffed animal: Goofy. Sadly, I didn’t get to choose which stuffed animal I’d be holding on to. At this point I was still uncertain of the need to hold onto something during the surgery but I’d soon learn the staff’s rational. Again I was instructed to use Goofy as a stress ball and to squeeze it rather than move my head/body as the procedure would be a tad uncomfortable. This is the first time anyone mentioned that the operation would be even remotely uncomfortable.

So with Goofy in my arms my eyelids were taped open so that I no longer was able to blink. Feelings of being in some deranged science-fiction movie washed over me as I starred unblinkingly up towards the ceiling as nurses hovered around me not quite in range of my peripheral vision. It was explained to me that the two large machines, the ones that would be actually producing the surgical laser that hopefully would correct my vision, were immobile and it was I, on my uncomfortable flat table of a bed, that would be moving, actually swung around, to be positioned underneath them.

As the doctor wheeled his stool/chair closer to me, he instructed me to always look straight ahead into the light and not to move at all. Then I was told that he would work on one eye at a time. My right eye would be first. I would be put under the first laser machine and then the next and then he would repeat the process with my left eye. There wasn’t time for clarification or questions if I had them as I was already being positioned underneath the first large laser machine, often called an IntraLase machine. This is the machine that cuts the cornea flap when bladeless Lasik is performed instead of the microkeratome metal blade.

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