D-Day: LASEK Procedure (June 20)

The anticipated day has arrived. I wake up early in the morning, stuff myself with what I assumed to be healthy nutritious food (but lots of it) and get ready to head to Dubai. My appointment was at 11 AM in the morning, but I arrived there at 10. I guess that’s the result of too much excitement and over planning. Now to flesh out the details of the entire process!

I step into the hospital, and the receptionist guides me to the operations section (located in a different place than the diagnosis & follow up area). I give the receptionist there my insurance card and relax on one of the numerous couches there as one of their staff asks if I would like anything to drink. I think to myself that I probably need to be well hydrated and choose to have some water (nothing too exciting yet). One of the nurses comes over and asks me to remove my glasses in order to allow for my eyes to relax as much as possible so they can scan my eyes and get a 3D map of its surface. So the next 15 minutes I’m blind, and in a somewhat meditative state as I open and close my eyes and try to be relaxed as much as possible. They call me again, and this time I get to meet the doctor. He takes a full scan of my eyes and asks me to return back to the couch where the nurse will put anesthetic drops into my eyes as he programs the machine.

The nurse comes back with a bunch of plastic things I have to wear before entering the surgical room. There is a plastic cap, plastic wraps to wear on my shoes and an upper body suit that covers my entire chest and arms. He then proceeds to put the anesthetic drops in my eyes followed by the strangest question “How does it taste”. Huh? What kind of question is that!? He tells me that usually the drops pass through the eyes into your throat and many patients express its funky flavor. Lucky (more like unlucky) for me, I was still at the last stages of my terrible cold so I still had some congestion in my chest and could not feel the flavor of the drops since it probably got mixed with all the phlegm in my system.

A few moments later, the nurse asks me to follow him (yes, this was a male nurse) into the operation room. There is a glass sliding door that he opens with his ID card. Following that, there were two large doors that opened up slowly like I was in a Metal Gear Solid game and a huge number [3] on the floor. The room had tons of fans on the ceiling to insure no dust/pollutants are in the air and there was a huge machine with a sliding bed which I later confirmed to be the machine that will laser my eyes. Let me repeat, the machine was huge, perhaps 3x3x3 meters.

I lie on the bed, and they swing it under the machine. There is an ultra bright ring of light with a red dot in the middle. The ring is so bright that looking at it for a millisecond will temporarily leave a blinking ring ghost mark when you close your eyes that is so clear you feel it was burned in your retina. There is a cushion around my neck and head that they shape in order to fix my head and stop it from moving. After that, they tape my eyelashes to stay away from the surgical area and then place a metal ring into my eyes which they expand to open my eyelids and keep them open. Since they already placed anesthesia drops into my eyes I could not feel anything and did not have any urge to blink.

Now that my eyelids are wide open and my eyelashes are out of the way, the doctor proceeded to place a suction device on my eyes. The second it touches the eye surface I react a little and the doctor asked the nurse how many drops of anesthesia he used. Apparently it was not enough, since the doctor put more anesthesia drops (and since my eyes reacted to the suction). The staff informed me that they try to use as little anesthesia as possible since the more is used the slower the recovery time becomes. A few moments later the doctor proceeded to place the suction again. This time I could not feel anything in my eyes (and I felt much better). The rest of the experience felt as though I was abducted by aliens and they were experimenting with me where I could not feel a thing. The suction was in place (I could see a black ring), then there were some sort of drops being placed, following by a tiny brush-like tool the doctor used to wipe the surface of my eye. The doctor then asked the lights to be switched off and for me not to move and keep staring the red light. He then placed a tube between the machine and my eyes and it felt like some kind of steam was being released from it (or maybe I was just imagining things). I could hear the humming of the machine as I stood there in silence staring at the blinking red light. As my heart beat, I knew this moment will change the rest of my life…for better or worse. The silence was then broken by one of the assistants calling my name followed by “right eye”. It was time.

I could hear the sound of a machine gun firing. It sounded more like a thin metal rod being moved right and left as it hit the side of a thin tin can. I tried my best not to move and tried to breathe as slow as possible. The red blinking light would disappear at times or move to the side, going out of focus, but I know my eyes were staring straight up. 30 or so seconds later the sound stopped. The light turned on and the doctor removed all the tools placed on my right eye. Was that it? I didn’t feel a thing and it was too short! The doctor then proceeded to work on my left eye and the process was exactly the same. Now, I had finished the LASEK procedure on both my eyes.

The assistant asked me to stand up slowly as she guided me to another operation room. It was time for the second, and perhaps more medically important surgery, Corneal Cross-Linking.