When I was 19 years old, my mom tried to kill me.
I had just finished my freshman year at Mizzou, and was coming home to spend the summer with my folks. A recent dentist appointment had told me that my wisdom teeth were coming in and that I needed to have those removed pronto. So we scheduled the appointment for a random Wednesday afternoon that month.
At that time, mom worked in a doctor's office for an ophthalmologist who did Lasik eye surgery. I had always had mediocre eyes and was interested in the procedure (mainly because I knew Jessica Simpson had done it).
So I went into mom's office and had them do the four hours worth of testing (let's get some perspective here, people... In four hours you could watch Titanic start to finish and then watch a full episode of Friends) and by the time the testing was done they had determined that I was indeed a candidate for Lasik. Cool. Thanks. I knew that already.
So mom, being the sweetheart-ed gal she is, thought it would be wise to get all of my misery out of the way all at once. She scheduled my eye surgery for the day after my wisdom teeth extraction.
"This way, you won't have to heal two separate times over the summer! Plus your eyes will feel so much better by the next day that you'll just be glad it's all over at once!"
Sounds good, right? Sounds like a well thought out plan.
So we thought.
The morning of my wisdom teeth extraction came and I tried every trick in the book to get out of it to no avail. I got strapped down in the chair and the kind nurse came over to me to run me through the drill (ew, drill, teeth, shudder, blih). I started crying immediately because I hate teeth and I was afraid of the giant needle she was about to stick in my arm and I'm a huge pansy-ass. She tried to warn me, "Sweetie if you're crying when you go under anesthesia, odds are you'll be crying when you wake up... that will scare you! You need to really try to calm down..."
Really, who the hell does that work on? When does telling someone they need to calm down actually ever result in the hyper person calming down? That is an instant pressure-raiser. An immediate heart-rate-speeder-upper. Didn't work in this instance.
They put me under and I guess they pulled out my teeth (I don't really even know what they were doing in there during those 3 hours) and then the woke me back up. And they were right - I was hysterical when I woke up. They wheeled me in a wheelchair out into the lobby where I'm sure I terrified all of the people waiting their turn for oral surgery. Put yourself in their shoes for a minute. I was literally wailing at the top of my lungs, choking on my gauze and trying to fight my way out of the chair.
Anyway. Mom gets me home and puts me in my bed with an ice pack over my mouth and as many pain-killers as the law would allow. She even slept on my floor that night so she could help me whenever I woke up, like the angel she is!
The next morning my mouth was sore, but not too terrible. We had done a pretty good job of changing out the gauze when we were supposed to and keeping the affected areas as clean as possible. I was feeling pretty good so I decided I would be brave and venture on with the Lasik, even though I looked like a squirrel storing nuts for the winter.
We get to the "surgery suite", I'm strapped into another chair and they give me the necessary amount of Valium it takes to let someone slice into your eyeball with a scalpel. My mom was standing in the gallery watching the whole thing go down (covering her own laser-enhanced eyes whenever anything got too gross). They get about 5 minutes into the surgery and mom hears the surgeon say, "Welp that's a problem", and set his tools down.
Turns out my corneas were too thin for the procedure. That's right. They managed to somehow miss this tidbit of information during the four hours of testing they did on me a couple of weeks prior. They conversed about this for what seemed like hours even in my Valium-induced state. My eyes were being held open by clamps and they kept having to water them with a little hose to keep them moist. Just heaven.
Finally, conversation ends, and they tell me they're going to proceed, but with a different type of surgery.
An Ophthalmology Lesson:
Lasik (what I was supposed to have): Where they slice your eyeball open, laser, and then your eye heals itself within about 12 hours
Lasek (what I ended up getting): Where they scratch a layer of your cornea off, laser, and that layer grows back over 4-5 days
(I have the whole thing on a VHS tape if anyone is interested in watching, but I assure you, it's quite disgusting.)
Surgery took about 45 minutes and then they turned me loose. I had a new pair of goggles and a giant pair of sunglasses for the ride home.
So I've got my old-lady sunglasses, my superhero goggles, and my fat cheeks with cotton gauze hanging out of them, in a lime green Juicy Couture terry-cloth track suit. I was a sight to see if I may say so myself.
I couldn't do anything by myself because I was BLIND. For DAYS. I couldn't feed myself. I couldn't watch tv. I couldn't bathe myself. I had to finagle myself into a bathing suit and have my mom help me. I remember blindly putting my swimsuit on and meandering my way into the bathroom only to hear her snickering at me.
"What's so funny?" I muttered, pissed-offedly.
"Nothing honey. Your swimsuits is just on inside out (giggle giggle giggle). You poor sweet thing."
My sister has a photo of me while I'm lying in bed with an ice pack made for shoulder/back pain over my mouth and my goggles taped (with that sticky ass medical tape) to my head like a God damn invalid. I haven't seen this picture in years and I'm 110% positive that she's saving this for the next time I really piss her off so she can put it on Facebook for the world to see and mock.
So thank you, my dear* mother, for not only muting me but for blinding me as well. Sometimes I think this was all part of your master plan to dull my senses one by one until I had to stay home and have you take care of me forever. Kathy Bates style.
*My mom really is the best person in the world - I don't know what I would do without her!
