So went and got my eyeball lasered this morning.

Left at around 8:30 AM for my appointment at 9:30 am.

Dozed through most of the trip there. Sorry I wasn’t very good company on the trip, Julian. 🙂 But I was up way too early.

Got there more or less exactly at 9:30 am, which was a tad stressful as up to that last minute we were worried about being late.

Not that it would have mattered, given how long I had to wait before the laser dude actually showed up.

I didn’t catch his name, which was a shame in retrospect, seeing as I had a very good looking doctor gazing deeply into my eyes for 45 minutes.

Well, deeply into my eye. Technically.

I was slightly miffed that it wasn’t Doctor Mackay doing the procedure. I guess he fobbed it off to a younger doctor, as is the privilege of older doctors.

It was definitely not true that I didn’t feel anything, though. From the very beginning I could feel the laser doing something to my eye. The pressure in my eye kept changing in subtle and not so subtle ways.

Plus there’s the fact that the light is REALLY bright. Which came as a surprise to me because I always assumed they used lasers with a frequency outside the visual range so as not to blind the people they are trying to treat.

But apparently not. So in many ways, that was the worst part of the procedure for me : having to stare at a red light over his shoulder while he shone a bright light in my eye.

That’s not the only bad part though. Sometimes he would keep lasering for too long and I would feel my eyeball warming up and starting to hurt.

Pretty sure that’s not supposed to happen. Ya gotta stop for a second now and then to let the patient’s eyeball cool down.

That was the kind of thing that made me very glad that I had taken a Xanax^[1] before heading off to get the procedure.

At the very end, he left the thing going for so long that I felt actual acute pain and said “Ow!”, and that’s when he decided the procedure was over.

To make things even more confusing, he then mumbled something about how I had “taken 2011 shots (??) and done fine. ”

Wait, was this a fucking endurance test? Were you just seeing how much eyeball burning you could get away with? Surely there was a correct number of “shots” to get the job done so it doesn’t matter how much I was able to “take”.

And the doctor looked all sad and bummed out like he was sad it was over.

What the entire fuck, dude?

Anyhow, like he had warned me, the vision in the eye in question (left) was a bit darker when he was done, but that cleared up in less than five minutes.

I guess there was some burned up eye cells in there or something. Scary.

Then came the burning sensation in my eyes – not from the procedure but from driving home on a lovely sunny day when my eyes were dilated all the way.

That was a long trip home. I kept my eyes closed for most of it. Now and then I would open my eyes and try to keep them open long enough for them to adjust to the light.

Which was stupid, because when your eyes adjust to changes in amount of ambient light, it’s via the very iris muscles those drops dilate.

Anyhow, made it home – thank God for indoor parking – and I still have two functioning eyeballs, so all is well.

I will be going back in two weeks to get my right eye lasered.

More after the break.

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I’m not here

This is something that has been on my mind lately.

I’ve been using this space to talk about how I turned my back on reality when I was raped as a toddler, and how ever since, I have been dealing with reality on a strictly minimum contact basis.

Part of processing that fact, though, is pondering the effect that had on others.

Because I think people can tell when you’re not really there. When despite being superficially pleasant and personable, on the inside you have one foot out the door already and could bolt like a startled doe at any moment.

That’s always been the conflict in me when I interact socially. I totally have everything I need to be a likeable, nay, lovable dude. I am charismatic, friendly, sweet-nature, witty guy who could totally be very successful socially.

But the fear in me ruins it all. I can be having a perfectly lovely conversation with somebody I don’t even know and on the surface of my psyche I am enjoying this rare warm connection to another human being but under the hood, I am starting to freak out and the urge to run run run away as fast as I can is building and it it gets louder and louder in my head until I can barely even make out what people are saying.

And there’s only so much time before, against my will, I have to go.

But because I have put up such a good front, people don’t know why I am running away.

And that’s just socially. I have no idea what impact my remoteness has had on my personal life and my relationships with my friends and my family.

Like I have said before, I bitch a lot about my sad and lonely childhood and with that comes a lot of bitterness about how the adults didn’t do anything about it.

But maybe they tried but just couldn’t get through to me. How could they? I was locked away in my own custom made coffin, staying as far away from reality as I could.

And some of that reality was people.

If I’ve ever frozen you out, I am so, so sorry.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.