I was nervous and scared as hell as I have real emotional hangups about my eyes being touched. So jittery, doesn’t even cover it. They gave me 1mg of Ativan that I wished was more to keep me calm. They said I would be in and out of surgery in less than 20 minutes and that most of that is the set up. Boy, they weren’t kidding.
I was led into a room and my husband was allowed to come in with me and hold my hand the whole time. I laid down on a table and they prepped me with some anesthetic eye drops and set me up in the machine. I have to say if you are squeamish don’t watch it done first because it looks far worse than it feels. The laser used makes a loud “pak pak” noise and that was the scariest part for me. I kept anticipating pain but there wasn’t any.
They use a pressure ring on your eye that is uncomfortable but wasn’t terribly bad. It feels like “ick oh there is something in my eye.” not the screaming ouch you would think. I can’t stress enough that it wasn’t bad at all. The worse part of it all was my anticipating the possibility of pain. My husbands surgery several months later was even easier because he knew what he was in for and didn’t worry as much I suspect. My eye surgery was 28 seconds on one eye and 49 on the other.
You could smell that laser in use but I felt nothing and they walked me over to the recovery room where I laid with my eyes closed and drank orange juice for 20 minutes. Not bad. I was given the ugliest sunglasses on the planet to wear whenever I was outside until I got my own. My husband walked me to our hotel of which I was glad he was there as my eyes were watery and I could have made it on my own but its nice not to.