Prep

My eye surgery is tomorrow and, as you can probably imagine, I'm rather jittery about it.  I haven't been sleeping well at all over the past almost week and often found myself having mild panic attacks, jarringly waking up from a sound sleep.  I would then in a sleepy manner try to talk myself off the proverbial ledge, as they say.  Anxiety is no fun, let me tell you.

The best way I found to talk myself down was this:  you basically HAD this surgery 2-3 years ago while you were awake.  This time, you'll be out...so what's the problem?  That little pep talk actually does work, believe it or not, and it's not entirely untrue.  They will basically be doing the same type of procedure except for the buckle which admittedly freaks me out a bit.  Luckily, I don't have to witness it but it does make me nervous to know what that's going to feel like afterward.  I can only imagine that my eye will feel like it's on fire, and quite frankly it felt pretty horrific for about 24 hours the last time as well.  My favorite in the prior procedure was that they punctured my eye, put in the gas bubble, etc., and then the nurse said, "Oh, I forgot to give you this eye drop...", and then puts that in my eye which basically felt like pouring gasoline on a wound and lighting it.  I screamed rather loudly and she said in an unknowing manner, "Oh?  Did that hurt?"  Yes, everyone's a comedian these days.

A ton of my anxiety actually comes from knowing where the procedure will take place.  We have a nice small facility right in our neighborhood which I've been in, seen, etc., and was hoping that's where it would take place.  Nope.  Instead, I need to travel all the way down almost to San Diego proper and be in some large medical building ala hospital.  So, yes, that's just added to my anxiety because the thought of all the hospital-like stuff just makes it that more "real", if you will.  It admittedly does seem a bit strange to think that I have less anxiety about getting something done in somebody's garage or shed...hmm.

Apparently, they use the same sort of anesthesia for this as they do for colonoscopy's.  That will be interesting because when I had that done, the anesthesia basically turned me into Rodney Dangerfield afterward, where I couldn't stop laughing and cracking jokes, god awful jokes at that.  I remember one of the nurses asking another, "...who's the laugher over there...?"  Keeping in mind that I had just been given a colonoscopy, in my Rodney-esque way, I literally yelled out, "Hey, that doctor over there raped me....and I didn't even know 'em!"  Of course, this was followed by uncontrollable laughter that probably made everyone in the facility completely uncomfortable on multiple levels.  So, yes, I can't wait to see if Rodney makes his reappearance tomorrow.  Get your tickets now!

It's also unclear if I need to spend 5-7 days face down or longer.  If it's longer, geesh...I'll certainly throw my back out again which will then take another week to heal, most likely.  Good times.  Let's just put it this way...when anyone asks why I didn't get any music released this year, well, just read these blogs and you'll know.  Wish me luck - I'll need it.