Laser eye surgery: Overcoming my fears

Me wearing glasses with my nephew Patrick in 2013

A white stick, a friendly guide dog and permanent blindness – these are the outcomes suggested by friends in the lead up to my laser eye surgery.

Either that or a laser-etched cyclops eye in the middle of my forehead. Against these fears are the words spoken by most people who have actually had the surgery: "Best thing I ever did."

To best understand my squeamishness around my eyes, take a failed attempt at getting contact lenses. When the nice lady got within an inch of my face, I bucked and flipped around in the chair like a fish out of water. After she spent ten minutes coaxing and trying to get near my eyes, I had to apologise for wasting her time and slink away with my tail between my legs telling myself glasses weren't that bad after all.

"Make sure you don't sneeze!" they said. "The laser will slice your head off!" Thanks, friends.

Did I really want to risk blindness or a third eye hole just so as not to have to wear glasses? Or was it like the risk of shark attack where you had overwhelmingly higher chances of being run over by a bus than anything going wrong?

5.35am

I'm awake early. I couldn't keep my eyes closed and every time I think of the word 'eye' terrible visions of medieval eye torture come to me. I sit nervously and wait for my friend Frankie to arrive. She has been assigned to be my seeing-eye dog for the day and can't resist making blindness jokes too.

11.35am

I'm walking the short distance from where I'm staying to the Laser Sight clinic for my initial appointment. At this point my eyes could still be deemed unsuitable and the more cowardly part of me is hoping that they are. I don't need my guide dog for this part and am considering getting lost so as to miss the appointment.

11.45am

I'm greeted by the friendly staff in what looks like any regular suburban doctor's surgery – magazines on the table, patients sitting around quite normally showing none of the terror I'm feeling. It's only my professional sense of decorum holding me in a kind of straitjacket while the madman inside me wants to run for the hills. I register mild surprise that the room isn't splattered with blood and bits of eye.

11.47am

I fill out some forms and am given an iPad and headphones to watch a film detailing what the procedure will involve and the risks. It makes it perfectly clear that this is "elective" surgery and that if anything goes wrong I'll only have myself to blame. I watch on hiding behind my fingers and take notes to distract myself from the horror.

A nice American optometrist called Michael takes me through a bunch of tests. At one point he has to put eye drops in and I start to freak out, but on the bookcase there is a kids TV character called a Womble (popular in the UK and NZ) and I think about them Wombling around picking up litter on Wimbledon Common to distract myself. Michael tells me I've got slight astigmatism in my right eye but "plenty of cornea" – more than enough to slice a bit of it and fold it back into place.

Why can't people have it?

If you have too much astigmatism in either eye you can't have it. If your cornea is too thin there won't be enough of it to make the flap.

What's the worst thing I can do and can I ruin it?

If you struggle and move around on the operating table the worst that you can do is make the process take a bit longer. If you squint or move your head, the doctor will have to correct you to get the equipment in place but once the suction device is in place and the laser is on, nothing can go wrong.

In the gown pre-surgery

Eye surgery: The main event

3.10pm

I walk back to the clinic, seeing everything – cars, trees, pretty girls walking past – as if for the last time. "Eyes, we've had a good innings," I tell myself.

"We've seen plenty of beautiful things in our time."

"But we don't have to do this," say the eyes. "It's ELECTIVE," they shriek. "You can pull out now – a lot of people say that you look great in your glasses, intellectual, someone with a touch of class. You're going to look like one of those squinting people who look fine in their glasses but when they're off everyone wishes they left them on."

3.15pm

In the surgery, the staff are so normal about the whole thing that it's calming me a little. I've been promised Valium and am hoping for the maximum dosage. They give me one 5mg tablet and I ask for double. To make my case I explain that the dentist gives me three, just for a filling. On my dentist file it says I am a "gagger". I writhe around in the chair choking on his fingers and biting down on all the equipment so he can't do his job.

3.20pm

I'm taken to sit in another waiting area by a nice lady called Helen whose job is to reassure everyone that they're about to undergo a routine surgical procedure and not have their eyes gouged out with a hot poker. She gives me a surgical hat, gown and booties and passes me some stress balls to fondle should I start to freak out.

I ask how my fear levels compare with most people's and she says I'm kind of normal. Some people you can barely get the drops in their eyes and some are mute and don't show their nerves but also show that they're not really listening. I watch as two patients go in and come out again 15 minutes apart. They look a bit dazed but they're walking under their own steam and don't seem to be stumbling around clutching eyeballs on their stalks and trying to put them back in.

3.45pm

Helen has numbed my eyes with drops and has now painted some green sterilising fluid around my eyes. She talks me through what's going to happen. Then the manager Yvonne who is acting as one of the assistants comes to ask me my name and date of birth, presumably to check whether I'm coherent enough to go through with it after my double dose of Valium. I pass the test and in we go.

3.47pm

Crunch time: there's no going back. Even though I'm still tempted to do a runner, my shame doesn't allow me to break 16 years of no one bottling it. I lie on the bed with Dr Hamish above me behind a set of machines. He applies tape around my eyes and keeps telling me not to squint as he makes sure my eyelids won't be able to shut during the procedure. They do one eye at a time and while they attach a clamp to my right to stop it moving – an unpleasant but not painful action – they cover the other one. Now everything becomes a bit spacey and I'm told to concentrate on a green light coming from a contraption above. A series of sheets of red light then pass over my eyes. Hamish tells me to keep my eyes open and look up, which is difficult as they both tear up. I resist the urge to flip out.

When they are ready, they apply a suction bit of equipment over the eye which I assume to be the laser.

"Stay still for 30 seconds," says Hamish and by now I'm more worried about prolonging it that anything else so readily oblige.

The burning smell

The machine kicks in and lights move over my eye. There is a burning smell like singed hair and I try to keep breathing normally even though I know that it's my eye being frazzled, like a piece of bacon frying in a pan.

For a moment everything goes black but then the green lights reappear and I refocus on them. The laser is pulled away and there is an unnerving few moments when through the blur I am aware of Dr Hamish lifting a flap of my eye and putting it back in place.

This for me was the scariest part but also the part that seemed most delicate so I summoned my reserves of courage and tried to pretend it was perfectly normal for a man to take a flap of my cornea, replace it over the eye and then delicately dab it back down, deftly pressing down at even points around the edges like he's finishing the crust of a pastry.

But the pastry is my eye and I squeeze the stress balls to stop myself freaking out. More eyes drops are applied and then it’s time for the other. By this point, I am either drained of nervous energy or zonked from the Valium but the second eye goes much the same only without the terror.

4pm

All done and I walk out of theatre surprised that I'm able to comply when they ask me to stand up. We go into the other room and Michael checks out my eyes to see they're all in the right place. He puts in some eye drops, attaches some plastic patches so I can't rub my eyes and dislodge the flaps and then I'm free to go. My guide dog has arrived to collect me and we walk back to where we're staying, me looking like Stevie Wonder with oversized sunglasses over my patches and women with prams making way for us on the pavement. The world is blurry and I need to be guided mostly because my eyes don't want to stay open but soon we're back home.

Doing an impression of The English Patient

The aftermath

4.15pm

My eyes are sore now and watering a lot. I tell myself they're not tears and just my eyes making sure nothing is in my eye long enough to infest it. I eat half a muffin, take two paracetamol and a sleeping tablet and hope I'll sleep. I've been told to relax and keep my eyes closed and try to sleep. The next four hours are not a pleasant experience. My eyes feel sore and scratchy and fill with tears so much I'm blinking them out every few minutes. I try to relax and fall asleep but the sensations are too strange and I wonder when I can have another painkiller.

The form says 8pm so I struggle through picking up snatches of sleep until my own snoring wakes me up. My cheeks and bandages are wet with tears but I'm not supposed to take the eye guards off or touch round my eyes.

8pm

My guide dog Frankie has fetched takeaway and feeds me spoonfuls in bed like I'm The English Patient. With food in, I gratefully take the other painkillers and sleeping pill and in an hour or so am asleep.

12am

I wake again and my eyes feel uncomfortable but I don't want to wake Frankie or try to do my own eyedrops so I take the final sleeping pill and fall asleep.

5.35am

I'm awake. I can't see clearly but the discomfort has gone so I get up and use the toilet. The bandaged man in the mirror is still disturbing and the blurring is off-putting but it feels there is gunk in my eyes getting in the way.

7am

Frankie cleans off the gunk and applies the first of the four different eye drops that need to go in four times a day. After they are in, I can see a lot better. Outside is too bright if I'm not wearing sunglasses but already I can read signs on the other side of the street that I would have needed my glasses for before. There is a bit of cloudiness that I'm told will pass but initial signs are good. I ceremonially put my glasses and prescription sunnies back in their cases and bid them farewell.

8.30am

We head back to the clinic and bump into a fellow patient who seems to have had a similar experience to me with the discomfort when she got home. She's also feeling much better now and closes with, "Why didn't I do this years ago?"

We see Hamish and Yvonne again to check the corneas have held correctly and I'm given an eye test. "Can you read this line?" says Yvonne. "How about the one below?" I get all but one right and am told that my eyesight is not only as good as before but better.

My vision was a bit cloudy for a few days but has been great ever since. Would 100% recommend it!

Sayonara, my trusty Ray-Bans