seeing and believing

the magic of a surgery

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

- Arthur C. Clarke

When I was young, I would pray that I would wake up healed. Through faith, through crossed fingers and chanted mantras, perhaps I would be able to receive divine providence. If Jesus cured a blind man, it seemed trivial for God to fix my mild myopia. I would plead my case based off of my virtues of doing well in school and remembering to brush my teeth with regularity, as if this was all that was required to deserve a miracle.

My eyesight wasn't bad when I started wearing glasses at age seven, but I never stopped wondering what it would be like to be freed from my spectacles, especially as my eyesight deteriorated through my teens and twenties. They were a small annoyance most of the time, except for the moments when they fell off my face. In those moments, I was Velma from Scooby-Doo, rendered useless. There were mornings when my glasses would fall from my bedside table, and I would blindly run my hands along the floor in hopes of seeing again. With time, I learned that I could use the camera on my phone to serve as a visual aid in moments like these.

A big part of the appeal of being glasses-free wasn't avoiding inconvenience, it was aesthetic. How could I not feel the allure of the rom-com transformation, a character removing their glasses to become someone entirely different? The shy, bookish kid turned into someone gregarious and beautiful, the fear in his heart destroyed by the unimpeded light entering his eyes.

When my brief foray into contact lenses went poorly in high school, I wondered if I was cursed to rely on glasses for the rest of my life. As I entered my late teenage years, I stopped praying for perfect sight — there were far more pressing matters in life to worry about. The dream withered away, and I found glasses that I liked, ones that suited my face and began to feel like part of my look, my personality. Glasses became an accessory that defined my look, a constant companion that were as much a part of my face as a my mouth and nose.

But when an eye doctor asked if I had considered getting LASIK, I jumped at the opportunity. Because of the severity of my myopia and astigmatism, I didn't think I would be a candidate for the procedure but my doctor told me otherwise. As I learned that my thick corneas would allow for the surgery to be relatively low-risk, it didn't really seem real. Even as I was waiting to be called for my surgery, I wasn't completely sure that I would emerge with clear vision, that my unfulfilled prayers would be answered, twenty years later.

My surgeon, in his deep South African accent, was indistinguishable from a shaman from another land. On the table, my vision was reduced to nothing, blackness. There was buzzing from an enormous machine, a smell like burning hair, and then my vision returned in a show of flashing colors and shapes that slowly grew sharper. After less than ten minutes, I stood up with watery eyes, able to read the time on a clock that I couldn't even recognize as a clock when I had taken my glasses off. I was sent to another room, and the surgeon called in the next patient, as if granting sight was a simple, mundane act.

At first, I could see shapes and forms that I couldn't before, but with a level of blurriness that made it imperfect. With each day, my vision improved slightly, as I could make out more and more. Six days post-op, I see mostly as I did with glasses, though there's a slight glare around sources of light. In my awe, I find this beautiful. The sun pours onto the breakfast table, cut into lines by the blinds and glowing as if imbued with a divine presence. Every light acts this way, and I feel grateful to see any of it.

So much is different. When you wear glasses with as high an index of refraction as I did, things close up look smaller than they are. Every time I see my hands, I feel slightly alarmed by the size of them. Everything is bigger close-up than I always thought. How much of my reality has been distorted for all of these years? My own body seems grotesque in its unfamiliarity. Every time I pass a mirror, it takes me a moment to recognize myself — I was so used to my eyes being framed and shrunken by my plastic frames, the sides of my face made narrower by the lenses. I didn't know my eyes were this big, I didn't know how my nose looked in proportion to them.

In the weeks leading up to the operation, I joked that I would have an identity crisis after this minor operation, and part of me wonders if I was right. I have always been vain, but my entire self-image has been disrupted. I have always been a man of science, but the change feels more like magic than medicine. Through this act of the objective and scientific, my subjective experience is permanently altered. My senses are how I interact with the world, how I take in all that shapes my mind and lifestyle. This physical change feels like it alters the metaphysical, alters the information that fuels my interpretation of the world, and thus feels like something greater. Something nearly divine.

Was everything that led up to this — being able to afford this, having my cornea be shaped just right — a result of my prayers, answered twenty years later? When you dream of something for long enough, when you give up on the dream, the possibility of it coming true seems insane. What do you do when it does? Do you loosen your beliefs on what is possible and what isn't? Don't you fill up with gratitude for what has come to you? Don't you start to figure out what you have kept yourself from doing? Because if this dream can come true, maybe others can too.

---

---

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• SONG - “Guts featuring piri” by Ellie Dixon, piri - I can’t stop listening to this song

• POEM - “A Center” by Ha Jin - only solitude is a lasting friend.