March 5, 2014. This was the day of my first surgery. We arrived at the surgical center at the unholy hour of 6 am. We were the very first ones there, so we completed our paperwork and proceeded to the waiting room. A woman and her toddler walking in shortly after us. It was obvious in her demeanor she was nervous. While in the midst of juggling a child, purse, coffee, paperwork and her sanity, she was told she had parked in the wrong place and had to go move her car. She looked around the semi-crowded waiting room trying to figure out what to do. She walks right up to us and asks if we will sit with her son while so handles this. Mom, feeling a connection only a mother who has had to watch her baby go through surgery could have, said of course. I sat and played with him from that waiting room and into the next one we were corralled into. I entertained him while his mother tried to get her hands to stop shaking long enough to fill out paper work. We found out he was there to have tubes put into his ears. It warmed my heart that when I was called back to get prepped, my little buddy started crying, I hope everything went well for them.
They took me back and got me into a gown and into a bed. This was when the piano of realization fell on my head. I was fighting off a swarm of butterflies when the anesthesiologist came in to hook me up to my iv. The next few minutes was a complete whirlwind or pressure cuffs, IV's, tape, and dilation drops. Can I just take this moment to say that is one weird feeling when you have one eye extremely dilated and one normal; my fields of vision were overlapping so much it was dizzying. Then before I knew it, my mom was being shown out and I was being wheeled into a very sterile and cold operating room. I felt like an outsider in a bee hive. Masked faces running around from place to place, popping into my field of vision long enough to ask a question or say something resembling elvish to another masked face. I was thoroughly overwhelmed when they turned their attention to me. My eyes were being held open and flooded with liquids ranging from numbing medicine to iodine. My eye was taped and clamped open, oxygen shoved up my nose and my IV turned on. Then I made the unspeakable mistake of attempting to scratch my nose, I was screamed at by at least a dozen masked faces and my wrists were immediately tied to the bed as if I was a mental patient. Finally they placed a large blue sheet over my face with a hole placed over my left eye. Then it began. I was completely aware of what was happening, I could hear every word being spoken, feel the pressure cuff randomly taking my blood pressure, even see things. The problem is that I can't begin to explain what I saw. With the bright light being shone into my eye nothing was clearly visible. I saw colors, swirls, and shapes, every now and then seeing very specific shapes of tweezers or a scalpel. Overall the surgery was uneventful except for having to numb my eye again because I could feel intense pressure. After about 40 mins it was over. As soon as they were done they were ripping tape off of everything, untying me, and rushing me to recovery. All I could was start to cry. The entire morning had been such a confusing and sickening blur that my dam of anxiety broke. They were in a hurry to get me out of the door, they gave me water, unhooked me from everything, took my water away, threw my clothes at me, told me to get into a wheelchair. I felt so nauseous, rushed, and emotional that when they wheeled me toward my mom I just busted into tears again. I cried as they wheeled me past the recovery and straight out the door and to the car. I was so sick from the iv that I threw up as soon as I got home, which is an interesting adventure when you are give explicit instructions to not bend over.
The nausea stuck with me for a couple of days and I took naps all the time, but the eye was holding up fine. I was continually concerned because my vision was hazy, tinted yellow, and the outer edges of my field of vision appeared to be shaking and flashing. Come to find out that was all completely normal. The haziness was due to the swelling and pressure in the eye, the waves was the lens trying to get used to the muscles and rapid movements, and the yellow tint was because that is what normal people see. Little bit of random knowledge for you, a natural lens offers protection from the sun and other bright lights, this results in a slight yellow tint. A normal person would never notice, however, for someone who has never seen that way will be driven crazy by the dramatic difference. I had a slew of doctor's appointments to check everything and let's just say the phrases 'amesome', 'amazing', 'damn good' were thrown out more than once. That was after they made sure they were checking the eye I had actually had surgery on. Nothing can be said for that odd moment when your doctor is looking at your right eye, quietly, concerned, hesitant, then switches to the left eye and releases the breath he had been holding with a "oh thank God, that's were it went!".They could not have been happier with how the surgery went and the fact I was seeing at 20/25. This surgery was the easier of the two because there just happened to be enough muscular support to hold the lens in place by itself. One week later I was going to have surgery that was going to be much more 'traumatic' .... oh goody
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