this page intentionally left blank

“By daily dying I have come to be.” - Theodore Roethke

If there were an ancient Aboriginal word for Heather Graham, it would be pronounced “hottie” with some clicks and whirs. I’m a little pissed at the incompetence of the MPAA to allow her and Bridget Moynahan to not only co-exist in a single film (Gray Matters… just rented on the PPV), but to engage is panty-clad passionate kiss with mutually consenting tongues for the world to visually digest on the wide screen. There should at least be some sort of warning label for lonely, single guys like me to spare the delightful agony of such fancies. It did get me thinking about how much I dig La Perla (definitely my fav) or Catriona MacKechnie… or even some of the Agent Provocateur stuff. Anyhoo, I digress.

So, I am not blind. This is a good thing.

I had LASIK surgery performed this previous Thursday and all went well. I was in and out in an hour and most of that was waiting around and not being subjected to the steps of the procedure itself. There are two basic steps… the creation of the corneal flap and the actual lens correction. The most unnerving of the two is definitely the creation of the flap. I went into the surgical suite and laid upon a small, but comfortable table adjacent to the Intralase machine. As previously mentioned, this is the machine that replaced the barbaric blade scraping a slice of tissue off the top of your eye with a more human, bladeless approach. In order for the laser to create an evenly distributed burn of uniform depth, your eye must be motionless, so they secure it with a small plastic device I like to call the “worst fucking part of the surgery”. It is a pseudo-flat piece of plastic that is inserted below your eyelids on the surface of the eye. Once your eye is pointed in the appropriate direction, they apply suction to this mechanism and your eyeball is forcefully arrested into the device with great force. There is no pain, but there is a lot of pressure and psychological discomfort. The instant the suction is applied, the effected eye is blinded temporarily. Blackness. The laser slowly scans the eye, creating millions of tiny vapor bubbles below the surface of the cornea along the way. There is no sound or sensation during this 30 second or so procedure. Once complete, they remove the gizmo and you can see again, but it looks like you are looking through a sheet of bubble wrap. This is repeated for the other eye in the same fashion. I think I almost passed out from anxiety during this step. I wasn’t scared and I understood what was going on, but I was having an involuntary pulmonary response from this procedure that was difficult to wrestle into submission. The next step was the correction itself. This requires going to a different table and getting poked and prodded a bit. The surgeon skillfully uses specialized tools to severe the edges of the cornea representing the perimeter of the gas layer just created by the Intralase system. When this is done, the top layer of the cornea can be manually pushed aside or pulled back (ala “flap") to reveal the innards ready to be zapped. The surface of the eye freshly exposed are dried and aligned with the VISX system’s eximer laser (as opposed to the femtosecond laser used by Intralase). The eye measurements and advanced scans performed during pre-op (like the Wavefront scanner) are uploaded into your custom profile residing on the computer handling the laser guidance. The instant the procedure starts, the laser targeting system performs an iris recognition routine on your eye, plotting several unique points around the iris and acquiring a target lock on each point. During the 30 seconds or so it takes to do the corrective burn, as long as the targeting system maintains iris lock, you have a 97% chance of 20/20 or better. If, at any point, target lock on your iris is lost, the laser is instantly powered down until lock is reacquired. That is some Buck Rogers shit right there, my friends. About 25 seconds into the corrective cycle on my right eye, I smelled burning flesh. My friend, Georgia, told me that when her LASIK was done years ago, her parents were there watching from the other side of a glass wall. They told her that her eyeball was smoking during the burn cycle. Freaky. Anyhoo, I sat up from the table and instantly could see without corrective lenses… the very moment the procedure was complete. I went in the next day for a checkup and everything looked good with the exception of some small scratches on the surface of my right cornea that managed to happen during the flap manipulation stage of the surgery. The analgesic drops used to deaden the eye surface during the procedure have a side effect of softening the corneal tissue thus making it more susceptible to damage. The largest of these abrasions is in the center of my pupil, so I’m effectively looking through the scratch. This blurs my vision slightly and am assured that, once healed, my right eye will be on par with my left. I’ve been doing the timed drops in my eyes (antibiotics and anti-inflammatory) which has urned me into a little clock watcher. I’m ready to get past that stage of the recovery for sure. I also must wear plastic shields over my eyes at night for a week or so to protect them from nighttime bumps and jiggles. I don’t mind that at all except for the residue left by the medical tape. It is difficult to remove and I don’t like being dirty. I was ordered to avoid computers and reading of any sort for the initial recovery… hence the delayed post. Well, that and I’m generally lazy.

Other than freakin’ laser beams being shot into my head, not much else has been going on. I went to see Damon Wayans at the Improv last night… very funny dude. I cracked open a bottle of La Crema pinot noir and am feeling wino-ish. I’m lonely.