Laser Quest: What Eye Surgery Felt Like

Long-term readers of my blog will be exclaiming about bloody time! when they read this post. They’ve been waiting for the next instalment of my laser eye surgery experience since last May - I promised to call the post Laser Quest, and that it would answer everyone’s questions about whether I was nervous, whether I could feel my eyeball when the “laser went in” and whether I could smell my own flesh burning.

(Sometimes I think I have the most overactive imagination in the UK but then I invite my audience to submit questions for various things and I realise that I’m not even in the running.)

If you haven’t read the first laser surgery instalment then that’s here. I highly suggest that you read it to get a bit of background on why I was even considering having my eyes lasered in the first place. It also gives a few technical bits and bobs about what my prescription was before surgery and some FAQs with my surgeon, Mr Allon Barsam, who is a partner at OCL Vision and one of the most qualified people in the world to answer questions about eyes and corrective surgery.

Hop on over and read it and we will all wait for you to come back before continuing.

Talk amongst yourselves, those who are already up to speed…

*Whistles*

Right. The surgery experience. I decided to have my LASIK surgery six days before I went on a two week family beach holiday to Greece, which probably wasn’t the best decision I’ve ever made, in retrospect, seeing as though I couldn’t get my eyes wet and had to put drops into them every hour, but you live with your choices in this life.

Watching my kids having fun in the sea on holiday, but not being able to actually go in the sea with them. Honestly? I’m not a huge sea fan so I was fine with it.

I was told that I’d need someone to collect me after surgery and take me home, and so I decided to stay in London overnight rather than go all the way back to Bath (I stayed at The Marylebone Hotel, which is just around the corner from OCL Vision, FYI, and very competitively priced for a cool, nice, modern central London hotel) and my manager, God bless her, agreed to come and meet me and walk me to my hotel room. At this point I hadn’t known her very long and it was a bit of an ask, if I’m honest.

“Come and get me when I’m off my tits on tranquilliser and walk me through central London wearing huge sunglasses, looking like an eighty year-old ex-Hollywood star who’s just been for a facelift.”

She has since left the industry, so maybe the experience scarred her more than she let on. (Sorry Lily!)

The tranquilliser thing is noteworthy: if you’re like me and respond - let’s say - enthusiastically to any sort of drug, then it’s definitely worth having somebody with you for a while afterwards. My body seems to have only have one setting, with drugs, and that is WHAT ARE THESE SUPPOSED TO DO? OK THEN LET’S DO THIS! BUT TEN TIMES MORE INTENSELY THAN ANY OTHER HUMAN! Give me a painkiller and I’ll be numb for eight weeks. Sleeping tablet? I’ll be gone for a year. I’m an absolute embarrassment.

It’s as though my body somehow manages to read the drugs info pamphlet before I take whatever pill or liquid or injection it is, because it also seems to know every side effect too, and then experience it. Nausea, depression, dizziness, headaches, stomach upsets, you name it, my body will seek it out!

So anyway, when they gave me a nice little tablet to keep me calm and happy throughout the surgery (you need to be awake and reasonably compos mentis) it’s no surprise that I was completely off my box approximately fifteen minutes later. I waited in the waiting room to be called in for surgery - which, by the way, happens with just your normal clothes on (no gown or what have you) and genuinely takes about ten minutes, including a little chat with the surgeon and some small talk about the weather - and to give you a gauge of how utterly bollocksed I was, just from the little tablet, here’s a brief replay of what happened whilst I was waiting to be called in.

‘Mrs Rebecca Green?’ said the nurse, from beside the reception desk. I stood up. ‘If you’d like to follow me,’ she said.

I went to follow her.

‘No, you’re not Rebecca Green,’ said the receptionist, ‘if you sit down, you’ll be fetched soon.’

‘Oh, OK,’ I said, sitting back down. At that moment I potentially would have sold my children if she’d told me it was a good idea. (Do NOT do any form of shopping, financial admin or decision-making on tranquillisers. Crikey alive.)

‘Rebecca Green?’ repeated the nurse.

I stood up and went to follow her.

‘That’s not you,’ said the receptionist. ‘If you just sit back down, you’ll be fetched soon.’

I’d like to say this happened three times, because the magic thrice is always good in stories, but at this point the real Rebecca Green stood up. Why an earth it had taken her two attempts to be able to recognise her own name I have no idea. Maybe she had also taken the little tablet and we were just a group of people in that waiting room who were all gloriously off their tits.

Anyway, it wasn’t long before I was called down to surgery. Was I nervous? Scared? Have you read the previous few paragraphs? I could have been going to have my fingers chopped off and sewn onto my head like antennae and I’d have still skipped down that corridor. Joking aside, though, Allon (my surgeon) had been so thorough and reassuring at my consultation that it would have been quite bizarre for me to have had sudden qualms. He had talked through the entire process in just enough detail for me to be clued up but not freaked out and I think that this transparency (as well as his very obvious level of high competency) had put me at ease from the start.

After a few final checks, to make sure that my eyes were still there*, we went into surgery. I remember every second of it, which you will no doubt think is a lie because of the Rebecca Green incident in the waiting room, but genuinely, the whole thing is very clear.

[*I can’t remember what those checks were for so I made that bit up.]

I had to go and lie down on a bed with my head next to a swish-looking bit of machinery. My only wibble of fear was when I was given some squeezy rubber stress ball things to hold in my hands, which I thought might be the modern equivalent of having to bite down on a stick (the caesarian scene in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves will never leave me, apparently) but they were just a distraction tactic, really, so that you didn’t think too much about what was actually happening.

Which was this, in the following little video, if you want to watch. I mean, I’m very squeamish usually but I find this fascinating, so don’t be too scared of it. There’s no blood, no scalpels or needles.

It all feels very AI and clinical and not-quite-real. And so bloody precise. I mean it’s quite incredible, isn’t it? That everything gets lined up to a tiny fraction of a millimetre, or whatever is smaller than a millimetre, and there is absolutely no real existence of any sort of error. I am not at all exaggerating when I say that I felt multiple times safer and more comfortable having my eyes lasered than I did having any other procedure I’ve had in my life, including a colonoscopy, hysterosalpingogram, cystoscopy, dilation and curettage after miscarriage and two caesarian sections. (There’s my medical history, you’re welcome. It’s VERY arse-and-genito-centric isn’t it?)

There was absolutely no pain whatsoever. A slight pressure when a small frame was pressed around the eye socket, I assume to isolate the eyeball and stop it from moving about when you blink and so on, but you can’t see what’s happening and so it all just feels slightly weird but absolutely not scary.

I really do hope that this is the standard experience, by the way. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be, at all. It costs nothing for a surgeon to thoroughly talk you through a procedure before it happens and then, if you’re awake, talk you through what’s happening in a calm and reassuring manner as it happens. I think that this was perhaps what maintained this overall sense of safety and comfort. Because the surgery itself is so unbelievably quick - I think it was a few minutes, maximum, for each eye - and so there is really no time to start feeling anxious or panicky.

(God bless that tablet, though.)

I was up and off that table before I’d even had a chance to relax into it and straight into an examination room to have checks done. Yep! I just got up and looked around the place and there my new eyes were! I couldn’t believe it!

Me, kind of high, and Allon, professional.

And to repeat myself: absolutely no pain whatsoever. I’ve had more discomfort during a smear test, if I had to think of a comparison. What I will say, about the pain, is that one of the (many) drops you have to frequently apply is a painkiller and I was utterly religious about putting in my drops. Perhaps if I hadn’t been, I may have felt some discomfort? Who knows. But I am a scaredy cat when it comes to pain and had there been even an inkling of it I’d definitely have noted it down.

Before leaving the clinic I was talked through the different drops that all had to be administered at different frequencies and in different amounts and then an app was installed into my phone that would remind me when to do each set of drops and then all of this was also written down on a piece of paper. The drops, you may have realised, are crucial. Another important thing was not to rub your eyes at all, and so for sleeping I was given two plastic eye guards and a roll of tape to tape them to my face, just in case I accidentally gave them a little rub in the night without thinking about it.

Looking a bit like the scary psycho guy from Red Dragon who has the big dragon tattoo on his back.

I have never been so paranoid in my life about rubbing my eyes as I was in the two weeks after surgery. I actually bought a dummy pair of glasses from Claire’s Accessories and wore them (they were hideous) for my entire holiday in Greece, when I wasn’t in sunglasses, just to remind me not to touch my eyes!

Anyway: you can see that there was absolutely no drama whatsoever with this surgery. Would I go for it again? If I needed an adjustment? I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And I get asked it a lot. My answer is relatively complicated, though, and so I am going to delve into this in the next post - which will be next week, I promise - when I talk about Laser Surgery: The Things I Didn’t Realise.

That title makes the post sound ominous, but I can tell you now, as a little spoiler, that I do not regret my LASIK in any shape or form. I can now read that stupidly tiny writing on the lid of a lipstick without any help. I can sit and type at my computer, or on my iPhone, for hours at a time and never do I have to strain my eyes or squint at anything or move it closer or further away to achieve a clearer picture of what I’m looking at. It has been nothing short of miraculous, overall, and the disruption to normal life was absolutely minimal. Compared to my disastrous contact lens trial, if the disastrous contact lens trial was an 8/10 inconvenience, the laser surgery was probably a 4.

I know that I’ll have missed off vital information here, things you’ll all have been hoping I’d talk about, so ask away in the comments if I’ve forgotten anything. The main questions are usually: did it hurt? and were you scared? and I think I’ve covered these off with a big fat NO, but anything significant that’s missing will be incorporated into my final post next week.

My surgery was performed by the excellent Allon Barsam at OCL Vision in London and I am sure, also, that he will answer any technical questions that I can’t. I know I keep bigging up OCL Vision and that might lead you to think that some shady backhanders have happened, but I can assure you that I paid full price for my surgery and am simply a delighted customer!

Sunglasses indoors! Post-surgery, looking like an aged ex-Hollywood star who has been in for an eye lift.

Abstract eye photo by Zane Lindsay on Unsplash