I've been thinking about getting laser eye surgery for awhile.  Today I called around to get some ballpark pricing on the procedure.  Each place I called went into great detail about the different options I could choose from, each option adding somewhere between $200-500 to the total price.  It's not like I want to find a cut-rate place for something as permanent as SURGERY on my EYES, but seriously, how do I know what do choose?  I don't understand the differences between one laser or another.  The benefits of one kind of scan over the other just moved right past my brain.  Trying to wade my way through the options and choices felt a lot like car buying to me.  There are so many options and so many prices and not everything is the same and I don't understand enough to choose the thing that will be just right for me.  The one time I ever bought a car on my own I only negotiated one thing.  I told the salesman I would buy the car if he would help transfer all the crap in my trunk from my old car to the new one.  He went to ask his manager and the deal was done.  It wasn't until I ran out of gas months later and called the dealership to complain that my "almost out of gas" signal didn't work and they laughed at me that I realized I had purchased a car that didn't even have one.  See - I didn't know what I was doing and didn't pick something that was really what I needed.

I understand the benefits but I just want someone who will do a good job and will tell me what I should choose.  What I want is to have good vision without wearing glasses or contacts.  I want to be able to find Sophie's nuk in the middle of the night without having to run back into my room, risking a stubbed toe or cracking my head on the TV, to find my glasses.  I want to be able to go swimming with the kids and be able to see them when they're more than 12 inches from my face.  I want Martin and Sophie and my dad to stop poking the lenses of my glasses just to put fingerprints on them.

I know about some of the risks because we went through this a few years ago with Marty.  After he got over the trauma of the experience ("It SMELLS!  They didn't tell me that!  It smells just like burning horns"...it's just shocking that no one used that example to describe it to him) and his eyes adjusted, it seems fine.  I figure that if my very particular husband can be satisfied with the procedure, I shouldn't have any problems.

But lately I've been thinking a lot about the possible side effects, and I don't mean halo vision.  It's been years since I've worn contacts which means it's been years since I've seen lots of things up close and without my glasses.  Like the bags under my eyes that are somewhat masked by their surrounding frames.  Like the giant wrinkles that have taken hold of my face in the past ten years.  Just the other day I noticed a lock of hair ready to poke me in the eye, when I went to brush it away it didn't move and I realized it was really a huge long wrinkle.  I didn't even see that it had started and now it's about two inches long and DEEP.  With glasses, it's not so noticeable when my eyebrows aren't perfectly groomed.  And with four years of less sleep than one should get, my eyes might possibly be permanently puffy looking.  Those are a lot of side effects that will all become more noticeable without glasses as distractors.

Despite all of the possible side effects, I'm doing it anyway.  We submitted our flex spending for the year and budgeted for the estimated expense.  Now if for some reason I decide not to do it, I'll just have to put that money toward vats of botox and get larger frames that will provide better coverage.