I am a different man with different eyes

3rd grade school picture

Me + glasses have been a thing for almost my whole life. I am very certain that the fact that I had glasses shaped my personality into who I am today (not that I was ever teased, but there is something about being the girl with glasses).

By my 6th birthday I was already wearing them

Even when I graduated to wearing contacts (which took a few tries before I really got into it) I still wore glasses every night. Reaching for my glasses first thing when I wake up has been the habit of decades.

But not anymore.

It turns out that my glasses are actually really heavy when I'm wearing them all day every day (with my high prescription comes thick lenses of great mass), and when in late December I discovered that wearing contacts was no longer a non-irritating option for my eyes I resigned myself to being the girl with glasses for the foreseeable future...

...until I remembered that they have surgeries for people like me. Not LASIK or PRK, no, that would be too easy (too cheap). No, the only non-glasses option for me is something called an ICL. It's an implanted contact lens.

Last fall (when I was in the midst of a temporary contact lens fast) my parents sent me a link to a live recording of an ICL surgery. It didn't look too bad, except for the patient had to stare at a bright light without moving. At that point contact-wearing was only days away, and I'd just had a couple of really traumatic eye appointments (all of them are) and I knew that staring at a bright light was not something I wanted in my immediate future. So that idea was tabled.

It was around this time. This picture is also (irrelevantly) the last known picture of the chip in my front tooth.

Probably the best thing I did when I impulsively decided to look into getting an ICL done was not to watch any videos of the procedure. I think that probably would've frightened me again. (I was already pretty frightened. After the surgeon finished my consultation I burst into tears as I scheduled the surgery.)

Of course, after I scheduled the surgery I started getting a lot of compliments on my glasses. I have always taken those really personally (to the point that in September when I was first thinking that an ICL could be fun, I nixed the idea when a young man said "You look so fantastic in glasses. Wear them more often.") and the idea that I may no longer be a girl with glasses started to wear on me. Would my identity be compromised?

(Ha. That's kind of funny now that I think of it. Just imagine if Clark Kent had ever taken off his glasses. Now that's a compromised identity.)

The funniest thing about it is I don't even really like the way I look in glasses. I got used to it in the month or so I had to wear them, but they make my eyes really small, and the lenses refract light weirdly in photos. So how much of my identity was at stake here?

This is not quite the last picture I took with my glasses, but the last one is too hard to find and also a really bad angle.

I was also really worried about the level of responsibility I had in this surgery. It wouldn't be like all the others, where they would safely put me to sleep and work there. I had to be awake so I could look in the light. What if I shied away? What if he chopped open my eye because I couldn't keep still?

The only answer was to get a blessing. So I did. That was pretty neat.

There's not too much to say about the day of my surgery. They gave me Valium but I remained disappointingly lucid (and tense!), which is pretty reminiscent of my lucidity after I come out from general anesthesia. My mom watched the procedure and wouldn't have said anything but when I asked her if I bled a lot, she said yes. (I couldn't tell! All I could see was that dang bright light!)

I did do some crying. That's pretty typical even if I'm not coming out from anesthesia. When I called the hotline to make sure the extra weird pain I was feeling in my right eye was normal I started crying when she said "Well they didn't say anything about it at your post-op so I don't think it's an issue" (I mean, she was right. It wasn't an issue. But, you know). I took a nap. I ate some food. It ended up being a pretty normal day. I could see just about as well as usual, even.

There have been two kind of odd things I've had to get used to. One is not taking my glasses off when I go to bed, and putting them on when I wake up. The other is the way my eyes look in my face without contacts in. I had not seen myself without either contacts or glasses for like 20 years. (I could see my eye without either, as long as I zoomed in so much that my eye was all I could see.) It's kind of different.

This morning I had my one-week follow-up. My vision is at 20/15 in both eyes. On the way out I dropped off my glasses at the donation box. I won't need those anymore.