LASIK diaries

Author’s note: I opted for LASIK because my eyes were too bad for SMILE, and LASIK was supposed to have a fast and easy recovery.

This is my (possibly unconventional, but definitely not easy) story.

Day 0: Day of surgery

It’s not fun. They take you into a room where they put a surgical cap on you, sanitize your face, and sit you in a (admittedly comfy) chair as they periodically put anesthetics in your eyes.

Nerves. Nerves. All the nerves. 10 to 20 minutes later, I’m lying face up on a table with heavy machinery above my head. Someone hands me a plushie. Cute. There’s a laser. I’m told to stare at it. It keeps moving! I tell the doctor.

“It’s moving because you keep moving your eyes! Just look straight ahead.”
But I’m not moving my eyes! This makes me nervous.

I’m not sure what that first machine does, but not long after, I’m moved to a second one. This one does the actual cutting. It doesn’t hurt, but the laser is really hard to focus on. To me, it seems to keep moving, so I vacillate between looking straight ahead and looking at the laser. At one point, the nurse cries out, “Don’t move your eyes! Doctor, please be careful.” This terrifies me. But I don’t know what to do.

Fortunately, the doctor tells me the surgery went well. Immediately after, I receive instructions on how to care for my eyes, and walk towards my waiting mother. My eyelids are heavy. My vision is blurry, like there’s a thin film in front of my eyes. Kind of like ill-fitting contacts, except much more disorienting. We head out.

The bus ride home is annoying — I’m told I shouldn’t take naps, but maybe it’s the adrenaline crash, or the medications. I can’t seem to keep my eyes open. With much effort, I stay awake, but each of my blinks feels like a thousand pounds. The bus ride is an hour long.

At home, I sit on the sofa for four hours and do absolutely nothing but meticulously blink and put in eyedrops every 10 minutes. I’m really sensitive to bright lights, so I ask my parents to close the shades and turn off the living room lights. At 8, I head straight to bed. What an exhausting day. At least tomorrow will be better, right?

Day 1: Day after surgery

My vision still isn’t great — better than yesterday, but I feel like I’m sitting in a small room after someone took a hot, hot shower. Foggy, unfocused, disorienting. I head back to the eye clinic for a checkup. They have bad news.

There’s a LASIK complication that occurs in 0.2-5% of all surgeries. Called flap striae, it’s when the flap that was cut off your cornea wrinkles, causing large visual aberrations. This explains my bad vision. Back under the table I go, where the doctor rehydrates and stretches out my flap. I’m given bandage contacts, and my eyesight does seem better. I’m told the flap striae was possibly because 1) the flap was cut too thin in an effort to save as much of my cornea as possible, or 2) because I squeezed my eyes or blinked weird post-surgery.

I’m frankly devastated. The hours after my surgery were exhausting, and I’d have to do it again. And what was to prevent this from happening a second time? I didn’t squeeze my eyes! … or maybe it the reflex squeeze from when I was using the eyedrops? How do I change the way I blink?! I spend the next 5 hours thinking about how I blink, silently chanting close.. open! close… open! the way the doctor told me.

I go home and make a silent wager with God. If my eyes don’t wrinkle again, I’ll donate money to the next Salvation Army solicitor I see. I’m that desperate.

Day 2: Day after restretching

Doctor says my eyes are OK! My vision is still a little wack — when I look at something nearby, my eyes often unfocus and I have to close my eyes to refocus. Or, if I want to look at something far away, I have to stare at my hand to focus my eyes before looking at the thing far away. My vision is perfect for about a second, before it blurs up again. I think it’s because of the bandage contact. Or maybe this is one of those things that gets better with time. Doctor says I should keep the contacts in until my next checkup (for my comfort???), so I’ll find out in a week.

Intervening days

I take super meticulous care of my eyes. I’m terrified they’ll wrinkle again. Protective goggles every night, don’t wash my face for a week, don’t even smile, in case it “squeezes” my eyes. I put in eyedrops at the slightest hint of dryness (17 times in 3.5 hrs!), wear sunglasses when outside (regardless of sunlight), research the causes and prevention of flap striae, and even have nightmares about accidentally rubbing my eyes. At one point, my left eyelid itches like fire. Eye drops don’t help. Q-tips don’t help. So I just curl up against the wall, fists clenched and eyes (lightly) shut, just waiting for the agony to go away. 

Day 10: Week after surgery

Doctor removes contacts: My eyes are still okay! My focusing issues (mostly) go away! I don’t feel the need to constantly put in eyedrops any more! My eyesight still feels a little blurry, a little hazy — but when the lighting is right, I have pretty damn near perfect vision.

Slight hiccup — my night vision has gone to shit. In the absence of bright, illuminating white light, everything blurs a little more. By moonlight, it’s like my vision wasn’t corrected at all. The doctor is very confused, claiming this isn’t a normal side-effect of LASIK. So then.. what is it? She says we should wait and see if it gets better.

Intervening days

I was spoiled. I know it. For 26 years, I treated my eyes like shit — rubbing them vigorously, not wearing sunglasses, not really thinking about them at all. Glasses are annoying, but I’d had them for so long. They never left my face, even in showers, so they were just a part of me.

Now, everything revolves around my eyes. Pack eyedrops. Wear sunglasses. Careful not to touch them; sleep with goggles on. It’s annoying. But hopefully worth it?

Day 17: Two weeks after surgery

Another checkup! I take the vision test. 20/20 in right eye, 20/25 in left. My night vision is still bad. This time, I’m armed with knowledge. Research papers note that visual aberrations, including decreased night vision clarity, can result as complications of LASIK! But before I can say this, the doctor (a different one), notes that problems with contrast are a known consequence of LASIK. And that it might get a little better, but not by much…. So the other doctor didn’t know what she was talking about? But it does seem to be a problem with contrast, and it sounds like I have to live with it. Hm. 

Day 21: Three weeks after surgery

It’s too early to tell.  Right now, everything is still a little hazy, like I have constant bleary eyes. Walking at night can be downright treacherous. Because I had perfectly corrected vision for 20 years, this actually feels like a visual downgrade. I feel… regret.

But the internet says it may take up to 6 weeks for the vision of people with initially high levels of myopia (that’s me!) to stabilize. And that most people get used to their new vision in 3 months or so. So I’m holding out for that. In another week, I’ll be able to rub my eyes again (thank GOD… although I probably still won’t, out of fear).

Ask me again in 3 weeks!

4 months later…

So, the visual aberrations I noticed earlier still exist — reduced night vision and sometimes hazy/watery vision in indoor locations with dim lighting. That said, humans really can get used to anything. Day to day life is almost unaffected; being able to put on a motorcycle helmet without struggling with glasses is great.

Other small, delightful victories:

• realizing I didn’t have to wipe my glasses after stepping into a building on a rainy day
• watching my coworker’s glasses fog up while drinking coffee
• owning AS MANY SUNGLASSES I WANT (because they’re cheap w/o a prescription)
• etc

I still occasionally reach for my glasses (when I’m about to wash my face; when I’m about to go to sleep). It’s pretty funny. 

2 years later…

Best decision ever. Dim lighting is still a problem (e.g. if I’m watching a movie and there’s red text on a black screen, or I’m playing a dark video games, my vision can get blurry), but that’s it! No other side effects. Overall my quality of life has improved significantly. I can press my face closer to the wall when rock climbing; I can take my motorcycle helmet off and on as many times as I want; I can read while lying on my side; and I never have to worry about losing my glasses again.

9/10, would do again.

because writing helps

It’s 12:43. I’m at the coffee bar. I sneak behind my coworker-friends and gently kick the back of someone’s shoe — a callback to an earlier joke where he claimed no one could kick off his shoes. He spins around, glares at me, and we all have a laugh.

I order my mocha — “The usual?” “Yes please!” — pick up our drinks, and head downstairs.

It’s 12:48. At the crosswalks, I split with the group, which is headed to the main building. I need to drop by security in another building to pick up a lost item. As I start across, we notice a stream of people rushing down the steep hill in front of the main building. The faint sound of alarms. Suddenly, police cars speed down the street, skid to a stop, and officers rush towards the basement entrance with guns drawn. I turn around and exchange looks with my coworkers. What’s going on? Guns, drawn? … Is there a shooter?

“Go back inside! Go back inside!” someone begins to yell. I’m already across the street, so I head to 1000. Another coworker rushes across the street to go with me. We sit in the lobby as people mill about, confused, asking each other, “Do you know what’s going on?” “I heard there’s a shooter!” “Someone said they saw blood!” “What’s going on?” “WHAT’S GOING ON”

It’s 12:52. I get a call. My heart warms just a bit at the caller ID. It’s Ethan, the safe-harbor kind of friend. He checks in with me, makes sure I’m okay. We wait a little longer. I glance at the Security door. They probably have bigger things to worry about than my lost fleece. I start to worry that the lobby is not the safest place — if a shooter was rampaging through the buildings, this would be where they enter. I suggest that we go upstairs.

It’s 12:55. From the second floor, I have a view. A half dozen people at a time are coming out of the basement entrance, hands in the air, waved forward by a heavily armed police presence. Another fleeting thought — is the window the safest place to be during a shooting? — but I don’t feel threatened yet. It’s a bit abstract. Like watching a movie.

We’re not there long before a security officer with a thundering voice tells us that we need to evacuate, now. His voice is a little panic-inducing, actually. I grab a bottle of water and we head towards the exit. As we stream out, I see a lady on her laptop, headphones in her ears. She clearly can’t hear what’s going on. We make brief eye contact — the strange kind of eye contact that seems to make time stand still — before I break it by gesturing forcefully towards the exit. She starts, and begins to pack up her stuff. I leave.

We’re in the parking lot now. We’re there for a while. Everybody in the parking lot is fielding a torrent of texts from concerned family, friends, and the curious. For many of us, the gravity of the situation still hasn’t sunk in. No one’s told us anything, after all.

An hour passes. Two. We get updates from the news. We chat, crack jokes to distract the one coworker who keeps repeating, “Levity. I need some levity right now.”

It’s 3:30 and we’re finally clear to go. My keys are stuck in the building, so we order pizza and I crash at a coworker’s place until my roommates get home. The next day, the building is still closed but we’re escorted inside to pick up our things. We share experiences, hugs, and go about assuring each other that we’re okay.

It doesn’t really hit you until the next, normal work day, as you take the same route through the same places you been through a hundred times.

Your coworkers are hurting.

Someone brought a gun to your company and shot indiscriminately.

I was just grabbing coffee.

Your workplace was violated, and all it takes is one person.

Holy shit.

a haiku

to code in java
is to die under the weight
of its boilerplate

How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well

*Note: Please read all italicized technical words as if they were in a foreign language.

The fall semester of my senior year, I was having some serious self-confidence issues. I had slowly come to realize that I did not, in fact, want to become a researcher. Statistics pained me, and the seemingly endless and fruitless nature of research bored me. I was someone who was driven by results – tangible products with deadlines that, upon completion, had a binary state: success, or failure. Going into my senior year, this revelation was followed by another. All of my skills thus far had been cultivated for research. If I wasn’t going into research, I had… nothing.

At a liberal arts college, being a computer science major does not mean you are a “hacker”. A liberal arts CS major prepares you for a career in computer science research, which is completely different from, say, software engineering. It’s like comparing a physical therapist with an athlete. Sure, a therapist knows which muscles get strained, and how to better take care of your body. But you can’t ask them to substitute for a player in a professional game. As a computer science major in my school, sure, I’d studied the structure and interpretation of computer languages. But I’d never even heard of the words front-end developer or full-stack. What was Heroku? Never heard of Xcode. Wasn’t git just the thing you used to share code with your lab partner? Frameworks? Didn’t you just need HTML and Javascript? What the hell was an API?!

Job after job description required IOS or Android programming experience, or a portfolio of websites I’d designed. I had none of these, and to be frank, I didn’t even know where to start. I hadn’t grown up in a tech-savvy family – my dad still can’t text. My mom still waits for me to come home during breaks to transfer new music to her MP3 player (which I bought her). I could pick at a couple tutorials, but how could I ever bridge the gap between me and them? The ones who went to technical high school, or whose parents were both software developers? The ones who had their own servers running, or whatever? Who had hacked into their middle school computer system in 7th grade? How could I ever compete with the technically privileged?

I settled for jobs that weren’t even computer science related. Knowledge of bash recommended, but not required. Even worse, I gave up. My experience with python scripting will give me an edge over other IT Help Desk candidates, I firmly told myself. I have experience helping old people with their computers. I should at least be able to land a job. That’s something.

<– SPOILER: I have an offer from Google. –>

Mid-September my senior year, that all began to change. I somehow became a friend of one of them, and it was all I needed to learn.

I initially put this friend on a kind of pedestal. The first time I met him, he was in the middle of writing a script to scrape Craigslist of all its free furniture listings (which is illegal, btw). At the time, I didn’t even know what scraping was. Then came the hackathon. I’d always wanted to go, but I’d never had the kind of friends who’d attend, and I couldn’t go on my own. I knew nothing. Who would want to bring someone as useless as me? But I shyly asked this friend if I could tag along – just to watch, mind — understand that I will be completely useless to you – and he laughed, said he understood, and we went.

He was the very picture of the competent hacker I held in my head, that I nursed a secret crush for. But most extraordinary, he threw something together using tools that he’d never used before. Yes, he did spend more time on Google than he did coding — but through sheer force of googling and a prior, general picture knowledge of how these things worked, he’d roped together a pretty sophisticated app. He knew where Twilio belonged in the grand hierarchy of things, and so, even without knowledge prior, was able to figure things out.

And I despaired. How do you get so good that you can build something out of nothing?

The rest of the semester passed glumly, and without incident. Come winter, I began to panic again. Driven by the need to become employable, I tried my hand at a couple Code Academy website tutorials. Hm. Not bad. I made an attempt at my first website – pretty terrible — just one, static page full of boxes and awful colors — but it was something. Something I realized. Just like my code-god compatriot, when I didn’t understand something, all I needed to do… was google it.

“How to center a div in CSS.” “How to make tiled background image in HTML.” “How to link to a pdf.” Sometimes it took hours for me to figure out the simplest things, but I’d come to understand that the answer was out there, somewhere. So I kept at it. Soon I was confident enough to try my hand at a small project – scraping our school’s Grades at a Glance website to create an automatic GPA calculator (our school didn’t have one of those). Eureka, it worked! And that wasn’t so bad, was it? Just like that, the first crack began to form on the illusion I’d cast on them as being a superior kind.

<– Some Small Advice: if you’re just beginning to program, I’d suggest starting with JavaScript/HTML/CSS because there is a plethora of help out there. You will most likely find someone has done exactly what you want to do. And do a couple tutorials! Even if they seem ineffective, at the very least they help you learn the terminology you’ll need to be able to google effectively. –>

Boosted by this small success, I gathered a group of like-minded classmates – friends who also did not have software engineering experience – to attend a second hackathon. Here, I had a second revelation. I knew more than my friends. Suddenly, I was an expert. I could speak the language. I knew what had to be done, and where things needed to go. After just two weeks of going through random tutorials, people were already beginning to see me as more competent than them. Sure, I was nowhere near the competency of my coder-god friend, but I slowly began to realize that the gap between me and him might be as artificial as the gap between my friends and me.

That’s all it takes. Really.

I took on a summer internship with a custom software engineering company. I was surer in my programming abilities than I was before, but I needed to be completely certain I had what it took to make a career out of it. There, I picked up IOS programming, Ruby on Rails, and Angular; I can make bluetooth devices do all kinds of gymnastics on a mobile phone. I’ve exchanged blows with git, shared intimate conversations with Cordova, chatted with Heroku, and I’ve even dipped a foot in the Android programming world. But most importantly, I know that experience, though important, is not everything. The gap is not insurmountable because I have what it takes to learn.

To be honest, I probably could have passed the Google interviews without any of this software knowledge. A solid background in CS is what they look for, and my school gave me that. But I never would have dreamed of applying to Google. I obviously didn’t have what it takes.

It took meeting a god and dethroning him for me to realize that I was wrong.

The barriers to becoming a software engineer are real. People born in technical families, or who were introduced to programming at an early age have this easy confidence that lets them tackle new things, to keep learning — and, in our eyes, they just keep getting further and further ahead. Last year, I saw this gap and gave up. But all we really need is the opportunity to see that it’s not hopeless. It’s not about what we already know, it’s about how we learn. It’s about the tenacity of sitting in front of a computer and googling until you find the right answer. It’s about staring at every line of code until you understand what’s going on, or searching until you do. It’s about googling how-to, examples, errors, until it all begins to make sense.

Everything else will follow.

Why I’m going to fail my background check and have my offer from Google rescinded

I usually keep good track of my paperwork, but one slipped through my fingers – a W-2 form, from a summer researching at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I needed it to prove that I had worked there for my background check with Google. I was pretty sure my dad had it, but when I called him for a copy, he said he couldn’t find it. Instead, he suggested that I just request a duplicate copy from the NIH. Easy.

 

In order to get a duplicate copy of my W-2 form the NIH, I went through the following steps:

 

1.  After extensive online searching (wherein I learned I needed an NIH account), put in a ticket at HR asking how I could acquire a duplicate W-2 form.
2. Was told to fill out a Request for a Duplicate W-2 and mail it to them. I did.
3. Was called and told that I could not be found in the database, so I had to call OHR(?) at some number.
4. That number told me they did not handle W-2 forms, and referred me to someone (Molly*) at a given number (*fake name).
5. That number took me to an automated voice mailbox system, or something like that, that required me to login, or provide the extension of the person I wanted to reach.
6. I called #4 back, and they could not find the extension.
7. I put in another ticket (step 1).
8. I was given Molly’s number.
9. I called the number, but was told that she no longer worked in that office… But wait! They knew she was tele-working today. They gave me a number.
10. Called number. See step 5.
11. Called back number at step 9.
12. Another person picked up, and gave me Molly’s direct number after I explained my situation.
13. Got to Molly’s voicemail. Left a message. A week passes.

Still no W-2 form.

 

###########################################################

 

I gave my dad one, last desperate call. Are you sure you can’t find it? No, I’m sorry. It hasn’t turned up.

 

Five minutes later, he calls me back, sheepish. “I didn’t see it the first time… but it’s where I left it, with the other paperwork.”

 

Dad!!