I woke up with a much better vision than I’ve had for the past 20 years. For most part of my recallable childhood, my vision had never been a perfect 20/20. It is definitely thrilling to be able to see the clock from my bed, to see the unique fingerprints that God has engraved upon the fleshing outgrowths on my hand. Even things in my dream were sharper, no kidding. The things the thrill you from here on is countless. I thought I better jot down the experience throughout the operation in case my euphoria from the gradual visual recovery washes everything blur from the past away.
The operation took a mere 15 minutes and much of the entire time I spent at the clinic, I spent waiting. It is pretty obvious that you will get bored from the waiting (see previous post). A nurse or clinic assistant, most of whom are ladies (I only saw a male assistant amongst the 30 odd female nurses), came to lead me to the operation room. She gently pulled aside the champagne pink drapes and utter audio instructions in barely discernible accent. I figured she wanted me to follow her by her curling hand gestures so obediently, I went away, taking off my glasses for the last time. I swore I felt the frame wept as I put it down for the last time in my life (at least that’s what everyone has been saying and I guess the message got to it). For that parting gesture, the time space continuum seemed to be shot with a high speed camera, one of those exhibits I saw at the CSI show now at Science Centre. I remembered, with frame-by-frame precision, how the angled rich maroon red of the linings of my Okaley frame kissed the cold table at the waiting room. The parting was brief but nevertheless painful.
And I was led, by a severely blurred image of a nurse walking a couple of feet ahead of me. We moved through more champagne pink curtains, much like how you move through silky white cloths in your dream to find the next act on stage. We emerged at the waiting area just outside the operating theatre. On the floor was a bright red tape depicting the boundary area for what I supposed was a cleaner area for sterility reasons. Stacks of slippers, burkenstocks(?) and crocs piled up like vehicles in a chain collision. I left mine neatly arranged in a parallel fashion, away from the accidental mess, and took a seat on this plastic chair outside two rooms with doors ajar. Yes, I was seated on a plastic chair, those you find in primary school during my era. The way I was positioned reminded me greatly of how I had to sit outside the classroom during oral exams. I remembered having those pictures in laminated folders and crazily cramming my mind for words to describe the boy in the extreme left corner trying to burn his mother’s hair up or the octopus in the lower right running from the sashimi chef. Anyway I sat, twirling my thumbs, the left moving in clockwise and the right moving in anticlockwise, each trying madly to avoid colliding into each other. I shut my eyes as I got tired of the blurry vision and gone into a long prayer.
I felt then a warm sensation on my shoulder. It was the hand of a nurse. I followed her, through two more doors before I reached the operation theatre. She guided me past the equipments with bright white LED lights. The entire scene was a hybrid between the sophisticated machines from the alien series V and the nice huge chair that you lie in when you visit the dentist. Though not too much different from the animation which I had to sit through, I thought the LCD screen looked terribly small. Maybe 9.7″? I remembered a screen of at least 27″ in the animation! Well, that was the only thought that crossed my mind as I laid my ass on the cold chair.
The room was flooded in a cool, grayish blue hue. A really sad colour I must say. I was hoping for a bright yellow, orange and some leafy greens. They should paint a butterfly at the corner of the exit.
Within seconds of my head snuggly fitting onto the head rest, the surgeon, a man in his fifties, came with an authoritative voice. I wanted to ask him how his wife feels about his job, being one of the only three men in the entire clinic flooded with young pretty ladies. And did I mention that his personal assistant is a gorgeously cute young girl that is probably 2/3 my age? Anyway I trusted him and his alien machineries.
My memory from here gets really choppy and I may get the sequence wrong. Hopefully you will be able to piece together the entire process from this permutation of still images. A ring of around 12 white LED lights was positioned above my right eye. Within the centre of this ring was a black hole of ~2cm in diameter. All the way into this abyss was a little flashing red dot. At least that’s what I thought it was but definitely I could never had made out what it actually was since my vision was hampered by astigmatism and lots of refractive interference from the liquid drops they were furiously flushing onto my eye. Two white tapes went to secure my upper and lower eye lids before a clear, transparent device was placed over my eye. For that brief moment, I had clear vision but still the aberrations haunted me. I don’t know what the contraption was although according to the sequence of events briefed to me earlier, it should be the eyelid-blinking-preventer. I made the name up myself and I think it’s really idiot-proof. Just in case, the contraption, I believe, was meant to prevent me from blinking. Or it could be that they didn’t want me to get my eyelids done at a free but risky cost.
When the contraption was in place, what came next was an entire nightmare. A suction force was exerted via the contraption to create a perimeter on the cornea. As the pressure amounts, the vision went away. Suddenly, I ended up on the other side of the white ring with LED lights and I figured that my right eye had gone offline. I looked around, with my remaining good left eye, and waited patiently for the system to reboot. The pain was manageable, especially if you have prior experience of having your eye gorged out.
Throughout the suctioning, I was hoping for Jesus to be the surgeon instead. It would have been a much convenient process, without the gown and the clean room, without the machines and the eye drops. A simple command or pile of mud on my eyes and walah. Praise God.
The rest was more or less what they told me. A flip of my cornea (invisible to me at least), aside and the laser went sintering like the sparkling sound you hear when workers weld metals together. A high voltage sparking tesla sound. It was fast, maybe 20 seconds top. The flap was placed back and the surgeon pushing it against the cornea. He then used a plastic device to level it, ensuring no creases around the edges. Pushing and smoothing as if he was layering a cake with the final touches. And done. Off went plastic suction thing and the tapes. Next eye pls, with a greater fear of the suctioning.
Surprisingly, memories of the second eye was less clear, maybe because so much of it was an overlap of the first. Nonethless, it was memorable, at least for now. I got seated in one of eye testing machines for him to do a quick quality assurance check before the nurses brought me out. I could at least see, with a blurry veil, my slippers and the way back to the waiting area. Truly, was blind but now I see.
