Let’s imagine for a moment that the world is about to end, by which I mean let’s read literally any news story from the past 18 months and follow it through to its natural conclusion. Got it? So, there’s been a nuclear catastrophe, or all the ice has melted, or Britain has haphazardly referendumed itself down to a scabby nub and society has to rebuild itself from scratch. Until last week, in the event of such catastrophe, I’d be screwed. Not because of my lack of transferable skills – whatever the state of the world, someone needs to write pithily sideways newspaper columns – but because I was quite heavily shortsighted. One tiny accident is all it’d take for me to lose my glasses, and that would be it. I wouldn’t see the apocalypse coming, and it’d be curtains.
This isn’t such a fanciful notion – Reddit CEO Steve Huffman recently confessed to having corrective eye surgery for precisely this reason – but, anyway, it’s moot now. I’ve had my eyes done as well, so I’m basically zombieproof.
I’ve worn contact lenses for almost 20 years, and that means I’ve in effect touched my eyeballs with my bare fingers 14,600 times. And I’ve got a toddler, so Christ alone knows what horrors I had lurking on the end of my fingers. Last Christmas, I ended up with an ulcer on my left eyeball. So, rather than risk 20 more years of unhygienic ocular prodding, I decided on the spot to get my eyesight fixed with lasers.
As I write, they’ve been lasered for four days. For the first time in more than 30 years, I can see without aid. I don’t need to wear the glasses that bore the brunt of a thousand playground footballs, or got smeared with foundation during clumsy adolescent fumbles, or ended up covered in food after every single mealtime since the birth of my son. I don’t need to wear the contact lenses that dried up and folded in and dropped out at countless inopportune moments. No, now I can actually see.
Over the course of the past four days, I’ve discovered two main things about laser eye surgery. First, many more people have had laser eye surgery than I ever knew, and once you’re safely in the club they then get to tell you how much their procedure hurt. Second, people ask what it’s actually like. So, to save time, let me just tell you all at once. The procedure I had was called SMILE which, unlike the more popular LASIK, doesn’t involve cutting any big flaps in your cornea. I chose this mainly because my surgeon offhandedly mentioned that sometimes the LASIK flaps can come unstuck and thwack against your eyeball if you’re not careful, a little bit like a tattered Euro 96 flag slapping against your dad’s TV aerial during a storm.
On the day of surgery, you go into a theatre, you lie down on a bed, and the surgeon clips your eye open Clockwork Orange style. He then paints your eyeball with some sort of paste. After that, the laser gently lowers towards your face and attaches to your eyeball with a suction pad. You see a green light flash a couple of times, and then you go blind.
You really do temporarily go blind. Your vision goes milky and clouds over completely, and then you can’t see. I thought this would be the bit where I’d yelp, and panic. Weirdly, though, I found it quite calming. It’s almost serene. In fact, my one lasting memory of the entire procedure is thinking about all the obligations I’d get to ditch if my vision never came back, which is obviously irresponsible and insensitive of me, but still probably preferable to screaming in terror.
Then, as my surgeon described it, came the “pushing and pulling”. Because SMILE doesn’t cut any big flaps, it reshapes your eye by removing a small piece of matter from the inside of your eyeball, manually, with forceps. This is usually the point where people regret asking me what it was like, and start to go a funny colour, and look for somewhere to throw up, so I won’t dwell on it.
And that’s it. When it’s done, your vision is restored but milky. Your eyes are so sensitive to light that you have to wear sunglasses for a couple of days, plus you have to sleep in goggles and subject yourself to all manner of drops that taste waxy when they drip down behind your eyes and into your throat. But you can see. Miraculously, incredibly, you can see everything with a clarity you’d long since resigned yourself to missing. It’s been four days, and everything’s back to normal, and I keep catching myself looking at things just for the sake of looking at them. Honestly, how has everyone been living in a world with all these details and textures without telling me? It’s amazing. Everything is amazing to look at, and I’m angry with you for not making more of it.
