The Kings: a new vision

no glasses in these pictures!

after talking about it for years, we finally broke down and set aside money in a flex spending account to get matt's eyes surgically corrected. most of you probably know my husband has always worn glasses, but what you didn't know is that his vision was actually pretty bad. about a year ago we had planned to do the surgery...sometime around the end of february. in fact, matt went to an appointment the day before i went into labor. we stalled on talk of eye surgery for a while after that ;)

but now it's been a year and we planned for it and finally made the big leap. it all went all right in the end, but as per our usual plans, nothing went quite as expected. matt's surgery was on january 27th. we had done all the necessary pre-op visits and medications and such. i went with him for the actual procedure since he wasn't allowed to drive himself home and watched as they prepped him and he waited for his surgery. as a guest, i was able to view the operation from outside the room on a small tv screen that showed the surgery in real-time. it was crazy to watch, but interesting to this ER nurse, until i realized that they had done one eye and had stopped working. then the doctor walked around to the other side of the bed, to talk to matt. then he sat up. my medical intuition and experience made me fear the worst for my husband, who was now sitting with one eye impaired from previous vision problems and the second fresh from surgery. after what seemed like much too long, i was asked to come into a room to sit with matt and the doctor to discuss "possible options." oh Lord, that is *not* what you want to hear when your spouse is having eye surgery (or any surgery, for that matter)!

it turns out that matt has a "weak epithelium" (outer layer) on his eyes that meant that the traditional lasik procedure ended up damaging it so badly they had to remove a portion of it. it sounds much worse than it really is, because your eye actually regenerates this tissue and it has no adverse effects on the outcome of the procedure -- meaning, they still fixed his vision in that eye. that's the good news. the bad news was that it meant that instead of healing overnight, like you would if your epithelium was intact, you heal over the course of a week and then some. eek! this meant two things: 1) matt was probably not going back to work the next day, as originally planned, and 2) if we wanted to operate on the other eye we would have to decide if we wanted to do it "now" or "in about a week or two."

after discussing the options and weighing the possibility of matt being able to return to work sooner with just one good eye vs. having to schedule another surgery date and recovery time, we finally decided to "get it over with" and let matt take some extra days off work, get both eyes done and put the whole thing behind us. i think we figured that one week of misery with blurry vision was better than dragging the whole thing out over a month. after a quick phone call to update his work, matt was back in surgery to have a different procedure done on his left eye. instead of lasik they did a procedure called PRK, which has the same result but essentially removes the entire epithelial layer (hence the longer recovery time). this procedure was much faster and seemed to be a much better fit for matt's eye.

after the surgery we headed home where i dropped off a sleepy husband before dashing back out to pick up new prescriptions (because of the different procedure) and our son (thanks, mom!). matt slept and woke up for rounds of eye drops and medications for about 2 days before starting to see some progress (literally! ha!). it took about a week for his vision to start getting much better, and we had follow up appointments nearly every other day for that first 7 days. by the time 5 days had passed matt was able to see well enough to go to work and drive. after that, his vision continued to improve and they staggered his follow up appointments to a week apart, then a few weeks apart, and now a month apart. he has been weaned off most of his eye drops and continues to enjoy his glasses-free lifestyle. despite the worry and the hassle we endured (and didn't expect), i think we both feel that it was a completely worth-while investment.

now next year we just have to schedule his wisdom tooth extraction....

matt's favorite part of the process: wearing the protective goggles

pretending to ski