Color blindness correction surgery so far so good

Of all my blog entries, I think this one I am most excited to be writing about. Here is the deal: if you've been following my blog, you wouldn't even have known that I suffer from color blindness. Suffer is probably too strong of a word, because I have been able to function fairly normally throughout my life, despite only having dichromatic vision. In fact, in some sense it was a benefit to me, because it enabled me to talk with three girls in in junior high school, who would not otherwise have given me the time of day. These were fairly good looking girls ("easy on the eyes" as some of my ancestors would have said), who had not yet been cured of their curiosity in science. So, a freak like me was someone worth experimenting with, testing whether I could distinguish this shade of brown from that red, ha ha ha isn't he cute, etc. Three girls out of my league in three years is not too shabby. OK, I've digressed here, and haven't even explained what is so exciting recently.

I have been considering for years getting corrective surgery for my color blindness, but until recently have been too scared to do so. (What finally put me over the edge?: hopefully I will discuss that in a future blog.) I'm pretty much a chicken shit when it comes to surgery having to do with my eyes. I don't feel like I have to apologize about this, though, because after all, it's my fucking eyes that I'm talking about. To give an example, I am also somewhat nearsighted, but still have not gathered up the nerve to get the laser surgery. It's not rational, of course. I have no problem pasting thin pieces of plastic on my eyeballs and leaving them there for half a day (or longer if I am too drunk to remember to take them out) without worrying about the lack of oxygen causing new blood vessels to grow on my cornea across my pupil, decreasing the level of light passing through my pupil and ultimately contributing to blindness. So that doesn't bother me, but gentle sculpting of my cornea with lasers or some kind of sharp carving knife that reminds me of a tonka trunk I had in the sandbox as a kid...that actually bothers me a lot.

But I felt like obtaining trichromatic vision was worth the risk of the surgery. Plus, there was an important risk-mitigating factor: without incurring exorbitant penalty costs, I can try out this surgery in small trials. The reason this is possible is first, because of a reasonably friendly eye surgeon that I found. Second, when introducing new color discrimination, many positive effects can be gained from even a portion of one optical system (a.k.a. "eyeball"), whereas spatial aberrations in vision tend to be dominant and require full corrective surgery to appreciate the benefits. Clearly I don't understand the science here, I'm just parroting the information I was given by people selling me various kinds of risky, expensive surgery.

So, I opted to go with the bottom-left field of my left eyeball for this first round of surgery. I chose this because when I was a kid my dad used to take me to archery on Saturdays. I look back on this so fondly now, but at the time I think I was an indifferent annoying pre-teen or teenager. The sort of freaky archery instructor (just how you would imagine him) first had me determine which is my dominant eye by looking at something far away through a triangle formed by my fingers, and then bringing this close to my head to reveal the dominant eye. It turns out it's (and by "it's" I mean "it was" in this instance) my right eye. So, this is how we selected my left eye. There were further reasons for choosing the bottom left quadrant of my eye, but I don't really remember them, and basically it made intuitive sense to me at the time that that the outside bottom quadrant of an eyeball is the most useless part. Don't challenge me on this, because I didn't use science while deciding this.

The surgery was amazingly painless and quick. You would think anytime lasers are monkeying with your retina it would hurt crazily, but it turns out that's not true. The most painful part was the initial injection of the drug or whatever into my eyeball. I have to be honest, I don't really understand the process. This drug is some kind of molecule or something that over time would just get broken down by the natural stuff inside your eyeball. But at first, it's a molecule that can react with things, but only when you shine this laser light on it. So basically, they have to inject this substance in your eyeball (with some special syringe that sucks / injects simultaneously (sort of like a more complicated epoxy dispenser) so as to relieve the pressure). I guess it spreads around pretty quickly, and then the cool thing they do is they shine this laser into your eye which causes the molecules to interact with the proteins involved in photon sensing in your retina. The laser light causes the molecule to permanently bind to the protein, causing the protein to absorb different colors of light than it used to, and effectively becoming the photon-sensing pigment that I had been missing. The key to the procedure, apparently is only modifying a fraction of my natural photon receptors. (If they modified all of them, then I would still have dichromatic vision, just a different kind--it turns out there are recent studies showing that this is equally effective, if only done in partial vision field, but the debate is still ongoing.) Apparently there are at least two ways to do this. The first way is to use optical interference of coherent laser beams to only stimulate transformation of stripes on the retina. The second way, as I understand it, is just to only shine the laser light for a brief time, so that only half the receptors are modified. As it was explained to me, the first method is much safer and easier to control, while the second is much cheaper. I opted for the safer method. The only remaining part is that you need to be looking in the correct direction for them to shine the laser. It turns out this isn't a big deal, either, because they just use some sensing mechanism to look at where you're looking and then zap at the appropriate times.

OK, this took me much longer to describe than I had been hoping when I started! The net result is that the surgery was amazingly successful! I want to describe in another blog or two about what I now see...but the quick report is that I can easily now distinguish colors of objects that I am studying. I will definitely go for full-field correction as soon as I can save up the money...but it turns out it's not really that important. Now, as to what colors I am seeing now that I am finally at least partially trichromatic, that too is another blog. As far as I can determine, I can see the same things now that most people can see, and I just need to tweak my definitions of colors somewhat. The bottom line is: THIS SURGERY WAS A HUGE SUCCESS and I am pleased with the outcome!