Here's the surgery room. It was actually pretty dark in there, these are 1/2 second exposures with the glass between me and them used to stabilize the camera.
The machines and the TV screen where I watched the closeups.
Here's the doctor checking that Gwen's ready to go.
All laid out.
Those lights are particularly bright when they're pointed in your eye, I can assure you!
Gwen, calm at the center of the storm so far.
Here's the doctor.
They do both eyes in like 10 minutes, and they do tens of people in a day, so they've got the thing down pretty pat by now. Very efficient operation.
Getting down to it here.
Can't see much more in the big view, so these are photos of the TV screen. Here they're cleaning things.
No idea what the little loop step is.
This mideval-torture-device looking thing holds your eye open. They keep dropping tears in there so it's not the end of the world, but it's not pleasant, either.
This is the lower portion of the blade that slices the front of your eye off. They attach it and then sucker it down so that you can't move your eye around and ruin things.
Closeup of the doctor with computer monitor behind.
Using the blade eye-slicer gadget.
After that they took the sucker and the bottom part off and now here's Gwen's eye zoomed in with an aiming reticle for the laser.
Ugh -- he's folded the flap away, now, and you can see that the insides of Gwen's cornea are not as smooth and shiny as the outsides.
You can see the flap really well here. Lasering
More lasering.
The laser lasted awhile -- I suspect that this is because our prescriptions were pretty strong.
Smoothing the flap back into place. This has *got* to be done right.
Click the "movie" above the youtube bit for a QuickTime version, but be warned that the QT version is 85 megabytes.
A shot that Gwen managed to take with me on the table right after hers was over! All in all, it's taken me quite a bit longer to make this webpage than it took for them to laser the both of us.