We have the technology; we can rebuild him.

I’d like to say the metrosexual project continues but for once, this has nothing to do with how I look. In the past five years I have made some amazing transformations.

I dropped forty pounds, got a real haircut, grew a goatee, bought more stylish clothes (thanks to Wendy) got and removed braces, had my teeth whitened and am now working out three times a week. I look better now than I did when I was twenty.

Monday’s appointment was in the same vein of improvement, but isn’t cosmetic. It annoys me to say that my eyesight is diminishing every year since I turned forty. My eyesight was a gift to me. I considered myself to have super vision and even excellent night vision, seeing movement and just plain better than almost everyone I know. I’ve always been proud of my eyesight. And then at forty it just started to dwindle until now I wear 1.5 and 2.0 reading glasses all the time. Even when not reading. The world just seems out of focus without reading glasses on.

Monday we went to an ophthalmologist to get my eyes tested and, hopefully, get laser surgery before we headed home for the wedding this summer. After two hours of testing and dilating my eyes and testing again we were led into a cute little doctor’s office. And I don’t mean the office was cute, but the doctor who was five foot nothing, a hundred pounds soaking wet, long blond hair, and just slightly older than us. She examined my eyes some more and looked into them with a penlight for any damage that the tests might have missed. Let me tell you, when your eyes are fully dilated and someone sticks a penlight into them, it hurts. I almost cried out, but of course I didn’t with two beautiful women in the room…

Then she explained the problems and the options to us with Wendy translating when the Spanish got too much for me. Which was most of the time. Anyway, it turns out that I have problems with pretty much everything. I am near-sighted and far-sighted and it’s only going to get worse because the lens in my eye is only going to continue to deteriorate with age, and if I understand it correctly, the two problems exacerbate each other. Sadly, laser surgery would do little to correct the problem that I have, but luckily there is an even better option.

See, when you get laser surgery, it corrects your eyesight, but your eyes continue to deteriorate with age, so eventually you are going to have to go back in and get laser surgery again. Now here’s the cool part.

She can replace the lens in my eye with man-made lens called multifocal intraocular lenses. These handle both of the problems that I have with two added bonuses: I’ll now be immune to cataracts, and I’ll never have my vision go worse from age. How cool is that?

The downside is I could go blind.

Shocked yet?

I did it for effect. Sort of. In reality, there is a risk of rejection of the fake lens, and risk of infection. All surgeries have risks which is why they only do one eye at a time. That way, if you have complications and go blind in one eye, you still have one good eye that you can 1) Hope doesn’t go bad with the other lens, or 2) wear stronger and stronger glasses for your one “good” eye for the rest of your life. If you try twice and your body rejects both lenses, then yes, you could go blind.

I’m looking forward to it. No, not the blind part, the part about having amazing vision that never needs to be corrected and doesn’t age! Woo hoo! Won’t that be awesome?

Sadly, we don’t have enough time to do it before we head home. We could get it done if we didn’t already have a bunch of appointments, work, there were no complications and we didn’t care that complications might arise that would keep us here longer causing us to miss the flight home.

Oh yeah, and after the surgery I’m not allowed to lift anything over ten pounds for a month so that would be fun dragging suitcases up and down flights of steps and through airports and into car trunks all at the risk of tearing a stitch in my eye and going blind in that eye. And working out would be finished for a while and I want to be buff for the wedding. I doing bench press reps with eighty kilos now which I think is like, four-hundred pounds or something, so I’m really getting there. :-)