PRK Trip

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In June I sent in my application to have refractive surgery done by the military. They accept all active duty soldiers that are good candidates for the procedure; but the appointments aren’t made on a first come first serve basis, there’s a three-tier priority list based on your job (not rank) in the military. I’m the lowest priority so I didn’t get a surgery date until September.

You can have it done in either San Antonio or at an Army base near Clarksville TN. The ophthalmologist here does them in TN but he was on his way out of the military and was going to be gone by September. I knew the new one would be fresh out of residency so I figured I’d take my chances with the doctors in San Antonio.

As many of you know we are almost out of debt (~30 Oct 2009) and so finding the money to cover a trip down to TX was the first problem. I went through my optometry books and found 3 that we were told to buy but never used. I decided that if I hadn’t used them yet, I probably wouldn’t ever use them. I put them on Amazon.com and within 3-4 weeks they had all sold for a total of around $350.00!

Monday we left after work and drove to Darrell and Stacie’s house in Stillwater OK. The next morning we had some yummy pancakes and before noon we were on our way to San Antonio. My pre-op appointment was at 7:00am the next morning so we didn’t stay with Paul and Cindy that first night, but with a brother of a friend of ours. They were very nice and our kids enjoyed playing together for an hour or so before we got them to bed.

The next morning we got lost on the way to the Air Force base and I was a couple minutes late to my exam. It went well and the rest of the morning the kids played at a park there on base. The weather was a little cool and windy but we didn’t bring any warm clothes. Since it was nice in Missouri we figured it would be even warmer in south Texas; so much for that. At noon I had a “consent briefing” where the surgeon talked to all her patients for the next day about the surgery and follow-up care, etc. I looked to me like there were 15 of us. She said she would be looking at everybody’s records that afternoon and evening to decide in each case whether LASIK or PRK would be better. I had figured based on my own numbers that PRK would be better, but for a different reason than the surgeon thought PRK would be better. In any case, we both agreed that PRK would be better.

That afternoon we drove up to Austin to stay with Paul and Cindy. The kids had a blast playing with their big bucket of Legos. We had a good visit and a great dinner (thanks Cindy).

The next morning, Wednesday, was my surgery. I was supposed to be there at 7:00 am again so we had to leave really early to get down there in time. It turned out that all the patients had to be there at 7:00. I don’t know how they picked who went first, but I was third to last. I had my surgery at 11:20 and was outside waiting for Ruth to pick me up at 11:40.

Right before I went into the room with the laser they put some numbing drops in my eyes. For the surgery they had me lay down on this flat bench/bed thing that, once I was settled, swiveled around so that my head was underneath the laser/microscope. They stuck a speculum in my eye to hold my eye lids open. I’d seen it done in real life and in pictures loads of times and always thought it looked really uncomfortable – it wasn’t. I looked at an orange light strait in front of me (somewhere up inside the machine) while the surgeon did everything. First she put a little dish on my eye to hold alcohol. It’s like a bucket without a bottom. The alcohol loosens that outer layer of cells that in LASIK they cut under. They did that for 15 seconds and then she took a little brush – looks more like a squeegee – and wiped it clean and made sure it was smooth and ready to be lasered. Then she rinsed it all off and told me to look at the orange light and not move – I never stared so hard at a light in my life. Earlier they had said it would take like 30-40 seconds, but I think it was less. It only seemed like 15-20. Then they rinsed that eye off really well and put a bandage contact lens on it; then they did the other eye. Like I said, not long after that I had called Ruth and I was outside waiting for her to pick me up.

Then we went to Chachos. It is a big Mexican restaurant in San Antonio. It has a normal place where you order food, a place where you order their homemade ice cream, and a bakery where they have various assortments of huge cookies, pieces of cake, brownies, and many other huge things you can bake in a bakery. They also have a really big play area for kids. We ordered some ice cream and the kids played.

At that point my vision was pretty good and my eyes felt pretty good. After ice cream at Chachos we drove back up to Austin and Paul and Cindy took us out to Rudy’s for some yummy BBQ. My 1-day post-op the next day was scheduled for 12:30 so we were able to sleep in a little the next day (Thursday).

When I woke up Thursday my eyes were a little more blurry and felt a little worse, but not bad enough to warrant any of the pain medication they had prescribed for all of us. Paul made us some yummy pancakes, including some with blueberries!

My appointment went well. They told me that I should probably start taking the pain medication that night because it would probably get worse. It did. From about that afternoon and for the next 2-3 days my eyes felt pretty crummy.

Once we were done there we started on our way back home. I was supposed to stay for a 5-day post-op on Monday, but I figured they wouldn’t mind if we left as long as I sent them a copy of my 5-day post-op done up here at Ft. Leonard Wood.

From then on Ruth had to do all the driving and so we didn’t make it all the way to Darrell’s before she got too tired to drive. We slept in the car and finished our trip up to Darrell’s the next morning. The kids played and we hung out there the rest of the morning and after lunch we drove back home.

By Sunday afternoon my eyes were feeling pretty good, but my vision was only slightly better if any.

Monday morning I went in to have my colleagues look at my eyes and get the bandage contact lens out. They said that they felt the bandage contact wasn’t ready to come out so we decided to keep it in for another day or two. That morning the refractive surgery center called and said that I wasn’t supposed to leave the area and that they were going to talk to the surgeon to see what she wanted to do. They called back and had me talk to her. She said since they were the ones that did the surgery they had to see me and that I had to come back down for my 5-day post-op!! I tried to reason with her and she just got very nasty about it and told me that she would notify my chain of command and execute disciplinary action if I wasn’t there at 8:00am the next morning! So, we set Clark up to stay with some friends so he could stay in school and we got in the car and drove back down to San Antonio. Ruth was a trooper and drove all night except for a 1 ½ hour nap in the middle of the night. We got there about an hour early. The doctor said my eyes were healing a little slower than normal, but that they looked good. They took out the contact lens and by 9:30 I was done. We went to the commissary and got some snacks, filled up the gas tank and were on our way. Before we even got out of the San Antonio city limits the kids were all asleep so Ruth pulled over in some neighborhood and we all took a nap. I don’t think we actually got out of town until around noon or so. We stopped in Dallas at a park we saw on the map and ate dinner and let the kids run around for about an hour. Then we drove until 9:30 at which time Ruth had to take another nap. She tried to drive a couple more times during the night, but in the end we basically slept most the night. We were on the road again around 6:00am Wednesday morning and got home that afternoon before Clark was out of school.

Now it’s been a week and my eyes feel pretty good. I still have to use the artificial tears every 30 minutes or so, which is normal. That will go down as my eyes heal. My vision is about 20/30 or so. It is slowly getting better, but I’ve seen enough PRK post-op patients myself to know that it can take several weeks for the vision to get better.

I was and am hopeful that eventually my vision will be acceptable to me without glasses; however, if by next spring it’s still a little too blurry for my taste I’ll probably get some glasses again. But this time the prescription would be very minimal.