On 3rd March I went for my LASIK evaluation appointment.
Before they can even consider doing the surgery, they run a lot of tests to make sure your eyes can actually handle it. And when I say a lot… I mean a lot. My eyes were scanned by different machines at least six times and I genuinely lost count of how many times they put drops in my eyes.
At one point they had to dilate my pupils, which alone took about thirty minutes. Once those drops kick in your pupils become huge and everything goes blurry.
Most of the tests were basically machines scanning my eyes and making these weirdly beautiful maps of the cornea. One of them is called a Pentacam scan, which creates a 3D map of the front of your eye.. showing the shape and thickness of the cornea.
Those colourful circles are basically a topographic map of the eye. The colours show how the cornea curves and how thick it is in different places. They check these to make sure the cornea is healthy and strong enough for LASIK.
After about two and a half hours of tests, I finally met the doctor who will actually be doing the surgery. She went through all the reports and said everything looked really good... she said my "corneas look beautiful, they are healthy and thicker than average"...
Because of that, she actually recommended bladeless Contoura Vision instead of standard LASIK. It’s a slightly more advanced version that uses scans to guide the laser.
So apparently I have very nice corneas.
I never in my life thought I would receive a compliment about my corneas, but here we are.
Conclusion: It is now a medically confirmed fact that my corneas are beautiful… and also thicc.
The experimental guitarist and songwriter Wendy Eisenberg has been everywhere for the last couple of years, popping up in Bill Orcutt’s Four Guitars ensemble and shredding in the post-hardcore Editrix, flirting with twang in the company of Mari Maurice and Ryan Sawyer and expanding the range of the electric axe with Christian Wolff and Morton Feldman. There is nothing wrong with Eisenberg’s work ethic, their courage to explore new territory or their ears, but apparently, their eyesight has long been a problem. Viewfinder convenes a team of young but very capable New York City improvisers to enact a cycle of songs about Eisenberg’s recent decision to undergo laser surgery.
Of the nine compositions, six are jazz-flavored art songs, prominently featuring voice and narrative, while the remaining three are largely instrumental. The 25-minute-long “Afterimage,” recorded live and about a year after the rest of the tracks, comes the closest to straight instrumental jazz. A slinkly Latin cadence pulses under acoustic upright bass (Carmen Q. Rothwell, but just for this cut) and fiery piano (Andrew Links). It is quite wonderful—the trumpet solo five minutes in (Chris Williams) reminds me a good bit of Jaime Branch’s work with Fly or Die—but, except for the title, wholly untethered to Eisenberg’s theme of seeing and not seeing.
Not so, the opening salvo “Lasik” which describes the artist’s ordeal in some detail. “Sent home to rest, I stayed awake, and watched my eyes grow stronger,” Eisenberg croons in her soft, off-kilter soprano, as the guitar builds staccato tension and a trombone blares ominously (that’s Zekereyya el-Magharbel who adds a really nice flavor to this and other tracks). The track shifts midway into an antic, jittery cadence, as a piano natters nervously in the upper registers. The music is full of half-steps and unexpected sequences; it fragments and stutters and blurs. And then Eisenberg closes with a verse that seems like a thesis statement, singing, “If this wasn’t true, it would be the most heavy-handed metaphor, but yes, I changed my eyesight, and yes, my eyes are blurry, I am surprised that healing takes forever, but changing isn’t healing.”
Other cuts pick up the concept to one degree or another, though never again as directly as in “Lasik.” “Set a Course” is sung a capella at first, then embellished with bass, drums and piano. It pushes past the known, but braver and more visceral as it goes. It’s as if Eisenberg is gaining confidence with her ability to see. The two-parter, “Viewfinder” juxtaposes the clarity of trumpet and high wordless vocals with murkier dissonance. The lyrics, too, concern what can be made out (and what can’t) in eerie couplets shadowed by trumpet tones. “Threaten me by telling me how you see the way I’m living,” sings Eisenberg, poking at the limits of even 20/20 vision.
Still with all due respect to Eisenberg and her new sharper sight, Viewfinder works because of the way it sounds, at times bright and harsh as neon, at others soft and ambiguous and elusive. You may not be able to discern exactly what it means, but the colors are bright, the edges sharp and the turns often surprising. We knew before that Eisenberg was a massive, multi-faceted talent, and now we know they’re capable of pulling off a concept album about eye surgery. Not everybody could.
I went to three different consultations and though it was really hard to pick between the choices, I ultimately listened to my gut and picked the LASIK center I always wanted from the start.
Price: $3,100 total (I am located in southern California, BTW); the other options were $5,200 & $5,500 (but then they later price-matched. I still declined, but still! It is worth it to haggle!)
I only visited centers that had surgeons of over 20+ years of experience, and 400+ reviews on Yelp with an average 5 star rating. That helped level the playing field for me, and let me stick to two things: how I felt during my consultation & price.
My optometrist wanted me to wait 6 months, which would be January 2020. I’m doing my surgery December... close enough.
I’m really excited! 20/20 vision before 2020, holla!
