The best laid plans...

I've been wearing my glasses since the Fiesta Bowl because I decided it was time to seriously investigate laser eye surgery. You have to have been out of your contacts for at least three weeks before they can measure your eye in its "natural state" so I figured my timing was perfect: Contacts out through January, examination and surgery in early February, and be completely recovered by Feb. 27 for the first Bandits game. (Most people are up and running just a couple of days after Lasik, but they say it can take up to a couple of weeks for some nagging side effects to disappear.) Of course, this is my life we're talking about, so nothing can be easy. I had a three-hour eye exam on Friday, during which my eyes were poked, prodded, measured, beamed with invisible light, and saturated with all kinds of drops. I was also dilated, which I highly recommend if you want a completely trippy experience. I'm extremely nearsighted, but after my eyes were dilated, I became farsighted, and being able to see better at distance is something I just can't wrap my mind around. They gave me a pamphlet to read, and on instinct I held it close to my face -- but it was blurry! I held it at arm's length and it came into focus -- very weird!

The end result of this marathon exam was that while my eyes are healthy, I have thin corneas. The average person's corneas are about 550 microns thick, while mine are around 520. The doctor even put the eyelid spreader in and put me under the laser used in surgery, but for the purpose of getting more precise cornea readings on nine different sections of each eye. I heard his assistant read off the measurements, and my highest out of the 18 was just 540 microns. Since Lasik surgery requires the creation of a 150-160 micron thick flap, the elimination of 10-12 microns of the underlying cornea for each diopter of correction (and I'm pushing a -8 in both eyes), and the desired residual corneal thickness of 270-280 microns (not counting the replaced flap), my eyes just don't have the structural integrity for the operation.

So Lasik is out of the question, but PRK is still an option. That's another form of laser surgery that shaves the top layer of your cornea rather than the middle of it. No flap is created, so it can be performed on people with thinner corneas. The downside is it takes much longer to recover from -- two to three weeks as opposed to three days. So after having spent all last month researching Lasik, talking to people who'd had it, and familiarizing myself with the procedure, I have to start over at square one with PRK. Not to mention the fact that the timing is all thrown off now, because they have to examine me again in two weeks and then if all is well do the procedure a week or two after that, by which time football season will be underway and I don't know how the surgery, recovery, and return to normal vision can all be worked around the games.