I had another amazing night of sleep and I'm now out of Vicodin and sleeping pills. The good news on the Vicodin is that I can drink now (yaay!) so Matt and I split a bottle of red wine last night with dinner.
Cue my mother calling me a lush.
My sleep was undisturbed except for two moments - the first time I was awoken by a sharp pain in my right eye. It went away and I fell back asleep. The second moment was a sharp pain in my left eye, which also went away quickly, but I decided it might be prudent to take some ibuprofen to stay ahead of any potential pain curve.
I'm past the 48 hour mark (it was actually yesterday around noon), which is supposed to be the worst part. Mornings have been the worst so far, but this morning was really not so bad.
I woke up around 11am without any pain. My right eye is still a little blurry, but not as bad as yesterday. So far today I've had breakfast, washed dishes, and listened to more of Amy Poehler.
I'm extremely bored.
It has been relaxing to lay around, but it has also been extremely boring. Matt drove down to Illinois early this morning with his mom's boyfriend, Myles, to drive back a car that Myles was purchasing and I'm so so bored. I suggested last night that maybe I should go with them and we should spend the day in Chicago, since they were headed that way anyway, but I wasn't sure how I would feel today so I ended up scrapping that plan. Right about now, I'm wishing I had said "Let's do it!" but hindsight is 20/20. And so is my normal sight! Well, almost.
I did have pretty bad dry eye yesterday, but I think it was mainly due to the contacts I'm wearing. They're extended wear and thus intended to be able to sleep in them, but they've been feeling increasingly dry.
My doctor told me that if one falls out on the floor or something to just leave it and not worry, and they also told me that I would be able to take them out on Sunday but I should put them in a contact case in case I feel the need to put them back in. So from that information, I deduced the following:
1. It's not the end of the world if the contact comes out before Sunday
2. It's ok to take the contact out and then put it back in
So, yesterday before dinner, I took the contacts out, put them in a case with some solution and let them soak for a bit, hoping it would make them feel a little less dry.
The purpose of the contact is to protect the vulnerable, recently-lasered surface of my eye from the air and all the fun things that float around in it, but also from my eyelids. The doctor said having your eyelid slide over the surface of the eye constantly after PRK can really irritate the eye and be extremely painful. The contact acts as a barrier or protector of the eye.
When I took the contacts out, it did feel a bit tender. It wasn't the worst thing in the world to blink, but I could see how it would be very irritating to blink over and over. So, I mostly sat there with my eyes closed and shook the case around a little bit, then put those suckers back in.
And it did feel a little better. A more long-term soak probably would have helped more, but I was kinda nervous.
I think it would be reeeally hard to deal with this surgery if you had never worn contacts before. Honestly, the most consistently irritating thing since the surgery has been the dryness of the contact, and at one point I think one of my eyelashes was poking at it or under it, which was a fairly common and annoying occurrence as a contact wearer. If I had never dealt with those feelings before, I would probably be freaked out. Also the doctor said for people who've never worn contacts before, they have to actually come into the office and have the doctor take the lenses out for them 5 days later. Weird.
Something else that's weird and ironic and makes me feel like things really do happen for a reason is that the little bit of pain I have experienced is actually very, very similar to pain I've felt before...in 2011 when I burnt the top and middle layer of my cornea when I misused my brother's Clear Care solution. It happened on the 4th of July and my eyes were super light sensitive and pretty painful..yet I still went to Cedar Point the next day (priorities, yo).
I also got a bunch of drops to help with the pain, and I'm pretty sure one of the drops is the same as what I'm using now (at least they were both steroid drops with pink caps). So not only do I have experience with using said drops, but I also have felt this cornea pain before, and I understand how a contact can act as a bandage. A couple months after I burnt my eye, I was back to wearing contacts because the people from the Urgent Care in Grandville has told me I could. But I was waking up with this weird pain, popping in contacts, and then the pain would feel better throughout the day. I finally went to an eye doctor in Chicago who explained the severity of the damage to my cornea and that my contact was acting like a bandage, but every time I took it out at the end of the day, it was tearing some of the healing away.
At the time I was terrified and angry and wanted to sue ClearCare and mad that I had to wear glasses for 6 months of my senior year...but when I heard about PRK, I would tell people "I probably know what this will feel like...And it actually wasn't that bad." And...I was right. It's pretty similar. And it's not that bad. At least for me.
To be fair, I've been told I have a pretty high pain tolerance...which I mostly chalk up to growing up with boys.
But the point of this whole tangent is that having that horrible and traumatic experience ironically gave me confidence to go through with this surgery. Weird, right? Also, thank God that those burns in 2011 healed completely and didn't rule me out as a candidate in the first place (I was worried that it would).
Anyway I'm feeling pretty good, although screens and small words are still hard to focus on and kind of tiring. I might try reading from my iPad for a little bit with the text blown up, old-person style...but hopefully Matt gets back soon and we can just play board games.
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