Chapter the Ninth: Lasik Surgery and you
No, I’m not scheduling this procedure for myself. But all sorts of people are having it of late, and I wanted to chime in with my unasked for, and most probably unpopular thoughts on the matter.
I don’t like it, and never have.
So many people report dramatic, and welcome improvements in their quality of life. How they can see things now that they never could, and why they are so deliriously happy with a violent, permanent invasive procedure which cannot be reversed.
Many years ago, I made a more or less full time switch to contact lenses for my vision correction needs. I have a physical defect which has nothing to do with my eyesight that will require me to wear glasses more or less until I get a cloned body, but the thing that I’m most grateful for was my Geordi moment.
I relate.
I have loved science, and the universe that exists beyond our planet, since my first clear memories. As a child, I had exceptionally acute eyesight, which over time and misadventure has fallen into myopia. I also see things in a somewhat pixelated fashion(as groupings of red and blue dots), not quite as sharp as most, but in incredibly fine detail.
At ever decreasing distances. When I first started wearing glasses in Jr. High, they were of the Giant, GI birth Control variety. Through the lens of History, I’m not entirely sure that I even needed them, but since I very much do now, it was a good idea.
To her credit, My mother did try to talk me out of them. She had been misdiagnosed as a child, and wore some truly horrendous corrective lenses for what we know know to be a muscular disorder, rather than an ocular one. I got access them in primary school, and wore them around for a week to see the world in a different way. They kind of hurt. But I digress.
The glasses I chose were a semi-unconscious decision to be inconspicuous, unseen. To hide my light under a bushel, and it’s one of the many beatings I will administer to alternate Universe Scott to help him along. Of course, the first such intervention would negate most of my life problems, and distinctly involves a lack of pain, rather than the introduction of it.
Over time, I wore them less and less, and really didn’t wear them at all during my first years of College. But towards the end, with everything else that was going on in my life, I thought the headaches were being worsened by eyestrain. (Turns out, it was the sun, and the concussion that accompanied my X-mas present. but that’s a story for another time.) I was wearing them when I passed out and hit my head (again), and they broke in such a fashion that they were not immediately repairable.
So, when I moved back north into the land of allergens, I got lenses. One night, I looked up.
There were colors. I had never seen them before. I was a little pissed off about it, but what can you do? It’s not like we can turn back time.
Yet.
But personally observing the red shift, and the actions of distant bodies for the first time was and is something I’ll remember forever.
At that time of my life, I had been wearing Tinted Glasses (the same pair, in fact) since I was 12 years old. I had no idea of the true color for anything, or how it was supposed to look to other people. I didn’t put any on again for a number of years, but I did pick up a fake pair of glasses, for continued camouflage purposes.
So, I’m a little crazy. Deal.
Of and on, as funds permit, I have worn contacts ever since. When I came to work here in Seattle, my company had an aggressive vision plan, and would buy me a complete pair of glasses every year if necessary. So I made use of it, and started alternating on particularly pollinated days. When I would “run out” of contact lenses, I would switch back to glasses, and when my glasses would break, I would fill a prescription for lenses.
The dance continues to this day. Some mornings, I just don’t want to be bothered with Contact lenses, and I make the choice to “see things in a different way.” With lenses, my vision dramatically improves (back to my childhood acuity of 20/15), and the colors are rich and vibrant. With glasses, I’m, somewhere around 20/20, and depending on the pair (my current ones are good, but not that good) and composition of the lens, I can distinguish a wide range of colors.
But not all of them.
Lasik Surgery (yes, the topic) will solve only one of the above issues. And moreover, will most likely need to be done again in a decade, or another decade. Like the knee surgery I keep putting off, or the procedures that will allow me to throw a baseball without pain, or possibly run on an ankle free of scar tissue.
I have absolute and unswerving faith that a non-surgical, but physically significant treatment for these problems will be developed “in the future.” Given the damage I’ve done to this body in the last 4 decades, I see no reason to pay someone for elective trauma, at a cost greater than multiple pairs of glasses and contact lenses.
Which I have already paid for. Talk to me again in 5 years, 10. When the chance of incidental blindness is smaller. When nasty-ass staph infections do not run rampant in US Hospitals.
When you don’t have to cut me, to fix me. I’ll think about it then, but I also may have figured out a better way.
Plus, Cloned bodies, hello?