Two days ago, I underwent elective surgery on the balls of my eyes. I mentioned recently that I was putting off summer travel until I get LASIK. Well, when I finally got my LASIK screening, I learned that there’s something newer and better (for some people) than LASIK. It’s called Refractive Lens Exchange (RLE). Rather than using a laser to re-shape your cornea and/or lens, in RLE they actually remove your lens and replace it with a synthetic lens. There are pro’s and con’s, of course, but I won’t get into those (unless a serious con manifests at some point). But now that I’ve been through it, I will say a few things about the procedure.

First off, the procedure is very quick…only around 30 seconds of time inside each eyeball. As such, they typically do both eyes in one visit, and I went along with that. What really had me worried was that they do this stuff to your eyes while you’re awake. Y’see, they need to have you move your eyes around at their command and they apparently don’t have a manual override to do it themselves. They do give you a sedative of sorts, but it doesn’t knock you out; it just relaxes you to the point where you don’t care that someone’s sticking a knife in your eye. Thus, I remember the whole procedure. I never felt any pain, but I did feel pressure on my eyeballs as each one was de/re-lensed. Of course, they have to prevent you from blinking, and for that, they use the contraption from Clockwork Orange (pictured above). Except that they only apply it to one eye at a time. This was the worst aspect of the procedure. I still wouldn’t call it pain, but it was definitely discomfort. But it was worth it, because the visual input my brain was receiving was like a Laser Floyd show…without the Floyd. When the show ended, the ophthalmologist said that everything had gone smoothly. At this point, I was given some prescription eye drops that I will need to use for the next four weeks. I went back the next day for a routine follow-up examination. After running the “look at the hot-air balloon” and “look at my ear while I sear your retina” tests, they told me that I was healing remarkably well.

Looking out across my back yard right now, everything is in focus, even when my dog tries to blind me by stepping into the direct sunlight with his giant whiteness. Using my phone and reading from a book are still challenging, but not impossible, and the doc tells me that my eyesight will continue to improve as the eyes heal over the next few weeks.

Now it’s nap time. Best wishes from me and my bionic eyes!