Surgery Day...

Today was the day for Denise's laser eye surgery. We headed down toward Los Angeles and TLC's Laser Eye Center around 0900 for her 1300 appointment. We made really great time getting down there missing most of the morning traffic. We stopped off to grab some eye drops and have some lunch at this really nice Tuscan place just down the street for the surgical center. When we arrived they did the typical paper work, took us into a room to go over some of the details (money) and then took us down stairs to the surgery suite.

From there they performed some verification measurements to load into the computer, prepped Denise for surgery and then got her in the surgery room. It all went pretty darn quickly. I did take some pictures during surgery (as much as I could watch) and some throughout the morning. You can find them here!

I was a bit worried when they walked Denise out of the surgery room because she was crying and I thought maybe something was wrong. She was emotional because she could already see. The doctor had asked her to look around the room and at the clock and she was able to actually see what time it was. Immediately after the surgery she was able to see about 20/60 on the eye chart and the doctor said that was pretty impressive and most folks couldn't read that well immediately after.

Because her prescription and correction was so large it took over a minute to do the correction on each eye and as a result her recovery is going to be much longer. As it stands right now she has to wear these very attractive skying goggles to keep anything from touching her eyes and she can not rub her eyes for three months.

The amazing part is her eye sight is pretty darn good right now. She is able to read things on the computer screen and the back of boxes which she could only do before with her glasses or if she got the item about two inches from her face.

On another interesting note - we had a huge wind/dust storm at home. The worst possible thing right now is dust and crud in the air and that is what we have right now. Hopefully things will be better tomorrow but it was horrible today. There were times when I was driving home that I had to turn on the hazzards and slow down because I could no longer see the road or any of the cars behind or ahead of me. That isn't comfortable on a normal day - but when we are worried about getting dirt and dust in Denise's eyes it's even worse. Fortuantely she slept nearly the entire 2 1/2 hours home or at least with her eyes closed.