It All Began With A Rock

Coundown, 24hours to Zero hour. Or 20-20 Hour, as the case may be.

People keep asking me: "So, are you nervous? Excited? Scared?"

I don't know what I am, to be honest. Right now I'm pretty apathetic about it, because I'm waiting. I'm not building anything up with anticipation; I'll deal with whatever fears I have when I'm sitting in the chair and they hook up their neutron laser device to hover menacingly over my eyeballs. I'll become giddy with joy when I open my eyes for the first time, sans glasses, and I'm able to see the clock on the far wall.

But right now, I'm very "blah" about it.

If anything, I'm fascinated by the whole process. Looking up how it got started, you can't help but wonder if this is part a folk tale regarding Lasik surgery, to make it seem more interesting a field than it really is.

The story goes something like this:

It all started with a miracle (their literature, not my words). One day, in rural Russia (as opposed, I suppose, to metropolitan Russia because that makes all the difference in this story) received a chip of stone in his eye.

(Now...let's stop here for a second. I'm 38 years old, and I'm done some pretty stupid, dangerous, limb-risking stunts. I've climbed the walls of buildings, hopped mailboxes and parking meters, slid face-first down slides and ice mountains on old schoolbags and folded cardboard. I've climbed trees, dove into the dark and murky fluid we here in New York pretend is ocean water. And I've broken more eyeglasses than I can remember, quite a few of which were subsequently repaired with Krazy Glue - on one such instance, bonding my glasses to my own face.

I have never, ever, ever, had a chip of stone lodged in my eye. What kind of silly shit do you have to do, to get SHRAPNEL lodged in your eyes?! Back to the story.)

So, distraught (you think?!) and in pain, he ran to the hospital and was treated for a corneal lesion (note: apparently this town in Russia wasn't as rural as we've been led to believe. And where are his parents in all this?)

After a few days, the pain began to subside and the blurriness got better. And better. And better. In fact, his eyes would not stop getting better. Within a few weeks, he could see even more clearly than before the accident! (again, how rural was this place, really? They had detailed medical charts of this kid's occuity on hand from before the accident? Come on!)

Later, doctors found an explanation for this miracle: the boy was nearsighted before the accident and the gravel carved a small incision in his cornea, making it flatter and easier to see in focus (...translation: he kept rubbing his eyes and scratched the shizzit out of them.)

Russian doctor Slava Fydorov reported the case in 1972 and turned this accident into a new field - refractive surgery.

(Okay, I need to ask this: what was the testing process like? "Come here, let me use this scalpel and cut into your eyeball, you'll see better - trust me!")

So there you have it. I'm trusting my future vision propects on a science founded by a kid who wouldn't stop rubbing his eyes.


8:29 AM