How it happened...

Last week: "Come on in at 10:00 and we'll do all the final tests, and then if everything looks good, we'll have you come back after noon for the surgery."

Tuesday morning 0900: Panic attack in full force. Thank God I'm not driving. MonkeyHusband: "You sure you want to do this?" "No, I'm not sure! Shut up and drive!"

1000: Battery of tests begins. My eyes are numbed, poked, measured, mapped, and we confirm once again that I am as blind as the proverbial bat. Something new emerges from these tests, though; "Well, basically, your corneas are retarded. They aren't uniform in the way that they need to be adjusted, so LASIK won't work as well. What we need to do is PRK." Essentially, instead of cutting a flap in my cornea and carving out the innards with a laser, they're just going to carve the whole top layer of my damn eye off. Yay.

1100: Battery of tests complete, decisions made, reluctantly, but hey, whatever turns out best in the end is what I want, right? Right. (Remind me of this later in the story when I start whining.) Instead of letting me go to lunch and change my mind, she says, "Just go ahead and have a seat in the waiting room, there's just one more in front of you."

1130: "Um, MonkeyGirl?" (in whispers) "Your credit card was declined. We ran it twice. They say it's stolen." (WaMu, you @#$%^& jerks, say goodbye to the interest from 5000 bucks. Hello, DiscoverCard!) Transaction complete.

1200: I am moved to the back hallway so that I can freak out in solitude. 5 mg of Valium is offered and accepted. No discernible effect. (EVER. Valium is now on my "Not worth the water it takes to swallow it" list.) Loud freaky popping noises emanate from the laser suite. Pulse 100, Respirations 30, holding steady.

1230: Crazy looking woman exits the laser suite wearing the creepiest dark glasses I have ever seen. She is walking with her hands feeling the way like she can't see a damn thing. Oh, hell. He's going to blind me and then make me look stupid on top of it. Pulse 120, Respirations 35, starting to climb again.

1235: I walk into a room that is as cold as the walk-in fridge that my grandma used to store dead animals in between death and butchering. Flashbacks of dead Bambi's are going through my mind, the Valium's not working, and she just took my glasses away. I am now blind and helpless in a cold torture chamber. "Hop up here on the table and put your head in the pillow." (It's not a pillow. It's a plastic, inflatable donut thing. So they can hose off the brain matter if the laser malfunctions, I guess.) Pulse 130, Respirations 40. Fingernail gouges in palm: engaged.

1240-1250: First eye torture, er, procedure, begins. First, numbing drops. Then, this freaky speculum to hold my eye open. Then he takes this thing that I swear to God was the eye version of an electric toothbrush and starts scrubbing the epithelial cells off my cornea. I can't feel it, but I can see it, and then all of a sudden I can't see and he's still scrubbing and WHY THE HELL ISN'T THIS VALIUM WORKING? Pulse 140, Respirations 45, Fingernail gouges nearly to the "drawing blood" stage. Now he's irrigating my eye with bottle after bottle of some sort of cold saline solution, and it's dripping in my ear and around the back of my head and down my neck. Then he pulls the laser over my head and tells me to look straight up into the light, don't move, and that freaky popping noise starts and OH MY GOD IS THAT MY CORNEAS I SMELL? (Kinda like burnt popcorn. Only worse. Cuz it's my eye!) Pulse 150, Respirations 50, Fingernail gouges now bleeding; I'm gonna have a stroke. Then all of a sudden it's done, and there's a lot more cold water in my eye and down the back of my head, and plop, there's a contact in my eye. (They put this contact thing in my eye for the first few days while the cells are growing back to protect them. I don't like contacts. Just FYI.)

1250-1300: No pause in between, repeat procedure as above, just as bad the second time. Pulse 160, Respirations 60, Fingernails no longer gouging, now poking out the back of my hands. Nurse/tech/whatever joking about, "This is you on Valium?" (Note to self, next time bring my 14 gauge Jelco of death to stab smart-ass nurse/tech/whatever in the neck with.)

1300: Corneas burned off, cheesy glasses applied. I can see a gazillion times better than I could before. (Of course, I was 20/400 in both eyes before, so that's not any huge accomplishment.)

1310: Leave office, enter the sun. AHHHHHHHH photophobia!!!!!!! I've got tears streaming down my face out of both eyes, so of course MonkeyHusband says to the parking garage guy, "Don't worry. I just had to open up a can of whoop-ass on her in there. She'll stop crying eventually." Pulse 120, Respirations 30. Never mind on the stroke.

1350: Drop off prescriptions at Walgreens, the second most evil pharmacy on earth, and head for the Chinese Food Buffet to feed the now-ravenous beast that resides in my belly. (Too stressed to eat for the last two days.) Chinese food people looking at me like I'm a druggie because I'm wearing sunglasses inside and I keep sneaking off to the bathroom. (To put artificial tears in my eyes. But they don't know that.)

1430: Go back to the second most evil pharmacy on earth to find that it has become the most evil pharmacy on earth. They only have two of my prescriptions. And they're not the two that I need RIGHT NOW! (The antibiotics and the NSAID eye drops. Like I give a shit about the Percocet and Flonase. OK, maybe the Percocet.) But would I like them to call across town and see if they have them? Yes, dumbass, I would! Perhaps you could call them 20 minutes ago when you first realized that you didn't have them, and then call me and tell me to go there instead, you retarded freak!

1500: $200 worth of eye drops in hand, headed home. Finally.

Tuesday afternoon - Friday morning: It's all a haze of eye drops, Percocet, more eye drops, more Percocet, oops, forgot to eat, hurking up my toenails, no more Percocet, but still more eyedrops. Somewhere in there, Wednesday, I think, I might have gone back for the first follow up appointment. I think I recall a very happy doctor telling me that 20/60 the day after surgery is very good. Might have been a dream, though.

Friday morning: Second follow-up appointment. The evil contact lenses are removed! Thank God. I remember now why I hate contacts. They are miniature instruments of torture put on the earth by a Devil with 20/20 vision. But my eyes aren't healing at the same rate. A new one goes back on my left eye until Monday. AAAAAARGHHHHH! Vision now a combined 20/25, but blurry. I'll take it.

Friday night: Back to work. One night before THREE WEEKS of vacation. Of course, it's busy as Hell. Every drunk in town felt the need to drive and/or pass out in the street. Between my eyes and the hypoxia..... I'm going to go home and become re-acquainted with my Percocet. I'll catch you later.