LASIK (and zombies) (4/12/13)

I didn't anticipate wanting to get LASIK.

I’ve never minded wearing contacts. In fact, they serve real purpose:
Taking them out at night keeps me from falling asleep on the couch and waking up with the tv on and a sore neck.
Putting them in in the morning wakes me up – nothing like being able to suddenly see things that, just moments before, were blobs of color.

Lasik is not covered by insurance and isn’t cheap. I know, I know, when you do the math…this many years of wearing contacts…this much for the contacts…this much for the contact supplies…blah, blah, blah… it works out for lasik in the end. The thing is, when it comes to money (particularly MY money), I’m not great at big picture – I just see that this large sum of money was in my bank account yesterday and it’s not there today…and I prefer things the way they were yesterday.

Part of me has always had this fear that, one of these days, maybe soon, people who got lasik 20 years ago will suddenly start losing sight… or perhaps turn into zombies…and the FDA will discover that the procedure is unsafe…and I will be one of the lucky few who, thanks to great foresight, didn’t get it.
Of course, if the result is zombies, I would be in trouble either way.
I’ve seen 1 episode of Walking Dead and, I’m just being realistic:
Faith vs zombies = zombies win

You think I sound paranoid? Keep reading…it gets worse

So now, after wearing my glasses for the longest 3 weeks of my entire life, I am anticipating the moment (now less than 24 hours away) when I will be sitting in my doctor's office trying not to think about the fact that machines are peeling back the top layer of my eyes and shooting lasers deep into the nooks and crannies (aka: “reshaping the corneal tissue”).


So, this leads to the question of – “Why?”

Why wear glasses for 3 weeks (again, the longest 3 weeks of my entire life), face a procedure which includes peeling eye parts, and (most importantly) take the chance of becoming a zombie, all to rid myself of a slight inconvenience (which I, personally, don’t even find to be all that inconvenient)?

I will give you 3 reasons (listed from least crazy to most crazy):

1) It comes highly recommended:
My boyfriend had lasik over a year ago. He loves it, loves it, loves it (and has yet to turn into a zombie) and feels it has improved his life immensely.
(Related reason: he no longer needs contact solution, so he doesn’t buy contact solution, so I can no longer steal contact solution from him, and contact solution is expensive. (totally kidding, boyfriend, I never stole your contact solution…ok, maybe once)

2) A firm belief in bad luck:
I recently started doing triathlons and am doing my first (potentially only… we shall see) full Iron Man in August.

-I swam in contacts all through elementary school and high school and, more recently, have worn them while swimming in lakes of all varieties.
I have never (not even once) lost a contact while swimming.
-I have biked in contacts many, many times – both stationary bikes and the ones that move. Also, if you know if my history with bikes of the moving variety, you know that I have taken more than a few spills.
Lots of bruises, lots of scrapes, but I have never lost a contact while biking.
-I have run in contacts once a day for years, in sunny weather, in rainy weather, in windy weather, in thunderstorms. My contacts always stay in.
I have never, ever, ever lost a contact while running.

A perfect contact retention record, yet I have no doubt that I will most certainly lose a contact within 5 minutes of starting the Iron Man Mt. Tremblant, an event which will likely take me over 12 hours to complete. So, yes, part of reason #2 is a firm belief in bad luck and part of it is just my attempt to take every ounce of potential (perhaps imagined) difficulty out of an event which is already going to be nearly impossible. I have to pick my battles: riding a bike over 100 miles is a battle I’m willing to fight, but doing it half blind...that's pushing it.

And, finally, the real reason:

3) The end of the world/armageddon/the apocalypse/nuclear disaster/doomsday/end of Mayan calendar/the aforementioned zombies:
A couple of months ago, I found myself having a very rational conversation with a some very grounded friends about everyone’s game plan for the potential end of the world (any one of the above-referenced situations). One friend, in particular, had a very specific plan, including a sprint home to retrieve her cat before biking north to safety (I can’t remember why north was safer).

Now, pre-this conversation, the end of the world was something I had considered about as much as lasik…not at all. Through the course of the conversation, however, I realized that I was woefully unprepared (please don’t tell Mo, but up to this point I had no plan to get home to get her before escaping north to safety – and I work, literally, 3 minutes from home, so it would not be difficult)

In the process of honestly thinking about things like:
Where would I get water in post-apocalyptic America?
Where would I get food in post-apocalyptic America?
How will we best survive the nuclear fallout of post-apocalyptic America?
it dawned on me….how would I get new contacts in post-apocalyptic America?
(this is all, of course, under the assumption that I would be one of the survivors of doomsday...just call me an optimist)

A pair of contacts are supposed to last, what, a month? and AT MOST 4 months (that’s the longest I’ve been able to go, anyway).
After that, I would have to have my glasses and, seeing as how I didn’t even have a plan to pick up Mo, remembering my glasses seems mmmm….unlikely.
And, even if I remember to grab my glasses, they are really cheap, badly made glasses (I never planned to wear them more than 10 minutes before I go to sleep and 10 minutes after I wake up). My guess is that they might last 10 years, at best.

This would be, after all, a post-apocolyptic world involving intense physical activity like hunting for food, crossing urban landscape on foot and perhaps fighting off the lasik zombies…all of which would be really hard on a pair of cheap glasses.

So, as you can see, I really have no choice - I have to get LASIK tomorrow morning.

True, I might turn into a zombie, but if you can’t beat em (and it would be hard to beat em if you can't see em) join em!