Recovery Weekend

Day 1: Once we arrived home, I took a couple more ibuprofen and almost immediately went to bed. The anesthetic had obviously begun to wear off, and I felt like someone had stuck a couple pieces of 40 grit sandpaper inside my eyelids. Not pleasant. My face was still beet red and my eyes were watering uncontrollably. I kept my sunglasses on, because even with my eyes closed the soft light inside the apartment felt way too bright. I slept for about an hour and decided to get up and lay on the couch. I made Nikki keep the lights out, and wore my sunglasses over my closed eyes while she watched TV. Throughout Friday evening, the sensation of torn contact lenses and cutting hundreds of super-potent onions continued. Really not pleasant. I was able to pry my eyes open long enough to throw in a round of drops before bed, and went to sleep.

I woke up twice in the night, once around 2:30, and again close to 6:00. I didn't think much about it at the time, but not only was my vision remarkably clear (cliché alert: I could finally see the clock beside the bed), but my eyes didn't hurt at all. By 7 I was ready to get out of bed, which is highly unusual for me. Threw in some more drops, put my sunnies on, and sat down on the couch. I was feeling much better.

Day 2 (January 7): I was expecting more of the blur and irritation of Friday, but that didn't really happen. My eyes remained sensitive to light, and I lounged around with Nikki most of the day, watching TV with my eyes half open and my sunglasses on. By sundown I asked her to take me out for a walk, and we went over to the Highline, walked down to 23^rd, and tried to go grab dinner at the Little Cheese Pub, only to find that it was closed and had been gutted. We went for wine and tapas at El Quinto Pino instead. After eating we walked back home, stopping in at 192 Books to grab some reading material for our growing number of nephews and nieces. My eyes weren't painful or too blurry, and there was minimal irritation for the rest of the night.

Day 3 (January 8): I woke up Sunday morning with a bit of a gritty feeling in my eyes, and some blurriness. I was expecting this. The doctors (and everything I had read online about PRK) had warned me that my vision would get worse before it got better again. This is because the corneal epithelial cells are regrowing over top of the reshaped cornea, from the outside edges in towards the center. As they begin to cover your pupil, they refract light and cause all sorts of fun things like ghosting, starbursts, double-vision, and general blur and haze. I'm told this goes away eventually. The irritation came and went throughout the day, and the haziness stayed pretty constant. This time, rather than a torn lens and onion cutting, the feeling was more like a little bit of dust or dirt in my eye. Manageable, but still not a lot of fun. We went out again, this time in the afternoon, to a cafe near home. Nikki did some reading while I sat and looked around through blurry eyes. I managed to flip through the day's edition of the New York Post (which doesn't get any better when you can barely make out the words... it's still garbage). This blurriness was different from my uncorrected vision. Before surgery, I could still reasonably read up close, even without glasses or contacts, and even though I couldn't make out anything beyond half an arm's length away. Now, everything's equally blurry, no matter what the distance. And it's not like the sort of unclear blur of myopia. It's more like the ghost images you'd see on an old TV as signals crossed in the air and through your rabbit-ears.