lasik surgery

I was "out of commission" for the past couple of days--couldn't read, couldn't work on computer, not even talking on the phone, as instructed by my Lasik eye doctor. This was my second Lasik surgery. I did my original one more than 1 year ago, to correct my nearsightedess. All went fine except it didn't really cure my nearsightedness 100%. They said it's because I was one of those high prescription patients and such result is normal. What I found is this insufficient curing of my myopia actually cured my presbyopia perfectly--I can read and work on computer without moving my head away from the object or wearing reading glasses. Long story short, at the end, I decided to have a "mono-vision" surgery again, one that will leave my right eye untouched, and operate only on my left eye so it can be truly 20/20 for distance vision. That's what I did yesterday.

It's second time around for me, so nothing is really new or scary, except while I was waiting outside of the operation room, I found they have a TV screen hanging above the surgery bed that showed the close-up of the whole surgery process that I could see from where I sat, so I got a free tour of what happened exactly to the patient before me: I saw how the eye's cornea flap got flipped over and tugged away, then the laser gun moved in, "da da da", applying the cutting, then the flap got moved back and "pasted" with a small brush... The whole process took less than 5 minutes. When I went in, the same process happened to me as I could tell, and I smelled the burn when the laser gun blasted on my cornea.

One thing they have you do before the surgery, is to sign a long document explaining that Lasik is not the only way to correct your eyesight and like any operation, it carries a certain risk of failure and you are aware of that, etc... This was probably the most scary part of the operation.

We all treasure our physical well being greatly, as I was signing the paper, I thought. We all want our body to be functioning 100%, if possible, not to mention not wanting any major injuries or the ultimate death to come to us. Yet we all know and learn from the bible and other teachings that this body is only temporary thing, we should not cling on to it too much... Yet we seem to like to cling on to it quite much.. How do we explain it?

One reason I guess is we do get to enjoy certain pleasures, not only physically, but emotionally and spiritually, through this body, that instinctively teaches us that in order to keep these pleasures, or to have them again, we need to keep this body we have. Or maybe it's just because we don't know there is any other way (medium) that we can have these pleasures. The religiously correct answer to this, then, is one day we won't need this body baggage or any medium to enjoy the eternal joy with the Lord any more.

Back on earth and back to now. We'll have our bi-weekly men's group gathering at my home again this Saturday morning. Come on over if you can. Instead of 9 AM, I'd like to move it a notch early, say 8:30 AM, this way we can enjoy cooler air in the morning and finish it earlier (say 10:30) so we all can go home and go about doing our weekend business if need to.