Some of you (most especially the Spain crew) know that around April, my dad emailed me to say that he sent my file over to a ophthalmic surgeon to decide if LASIK eye surgery could be an option to correct my inSANEly terrible vision. The file checked out, and we scheduled an appointment for the week of my return in order to go in for some testing and scans and continue with this little process.
Well, that appointment was today. I had to get up way too early, had my glaze-y-eyed appearance commented on by a very chattery woman in the waiting room, and got checked on by an assistant. We did some of the routine stuff, like determining the shape of my eyes and measuring the thickness of my corneas (in order for LASIK to be successful, the corneas have to have a certain degree of thickness of shape. The worse your vision is, the thinner your corneas are). The assistant took those measurements out to the ophthalmologist to have him look over some things.
Let me take this moment to provide some background. I have been wearing glasses since I was 5 years old. I had a brief flirtation with contacts (5th-9th grade) before we found out that they made my eyes wayyyy too dry for daily wear. Around the time that I went back to glasses, the ophthalmologist told me that LASIK would be an excellent option once I turned 18 and my vision stopped deteriorating so dramatically. So basically, I've had this laser surgery thing in the back of my head for years. I had even heard some of the doctors saying that this surgery would be necessary, not just cosmetic, and that I needed this in order to start over (vision-wise). It had kind of become an inevitability in my mind.
The assistant came back in and said, "Andrea, I have bad news. You don't qualify for LASIK because your corneas are too thin. If it makes you feel better, Dr. Bennett wants you to know that you missed it by a long shot." Yeah, that makes me feel a LITTLE bit better; it's not like I missed it by a few months or a year. It sounds like I missed it by several years. And several years ago, I wouldn't have been able to have the surgery anyway because my prescription was changing too rapidly. I guess that's that.
The good news is that my eyes are completely healthy, besides the fact that they don't work. There is no degeneration, no disease, nothing like that. They just don't work. Kind of like a spinal cord injury: the legs still have muscles and bones and are totally healthy, but they don't work.
The other good news is that there is a piece of technology that Europe has been using for years that is still waiting on FDA approval (not surprising, since Europe sells whole legs of ham in the supermarket and boxed milk that has a shelf-life of 6 months). It sounds like a surgical implant, and it would correct my vision regardless of how bad it gets.
So I guess there's a little bit of hope there. I was really really really banking on the LASIK option. I was looking forward to being able to swim and see where I'm going, being able to shave my legs in the shower and actually see them, and being able to walk in the rain without having to constantly wipe off my glasses.
I guess we wait.
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