Musings: Lasik Surgery and the Apocalypse

Do you ever wonder what you would do if the world ended? The apocalypse could come in any form - alien invaders, nuclear fallout, the hellfury described in Revelations, or [God forbid] zombie epidemic. If you were one of the survivors, how would you handle it? What would you do?

Well, I don't have to wonder - I already know exactly what I'd be doing.

Walking around like a blind buffoon, that's what!!
Allow me to explain.

You see I, like millions of other people in this world, wear contact lenses. I would be pretty much helpless without them. I have glasses that I wear every night to bed - and on occasion by day when my eyes need a good rest - but they really aren't nearly as convenient as contacts. But let's be honest: both are pretty much useless in a post-apocalyptic world.
When everything looks like this -

I hardly think I'm going to have the time, resources, and clean water to perform one of these maneuvers on a daily basis:

And honestly, what are the alternatives? Putting in contacts with dirty fingers, no cleaning solution, and God only knows what living underneath my fingernails is obviously not the answer...
Have you ever put in contacts without realizing there's a speck of fuzz on your fingertip? TORTURE. As in, I-wish-I-no-longer-had-eyes sort of pain.
Sleeping in and keeping your contacts in perpetually isn't really much of an option either. After one night's sleep, your eyes feel sticky and dry and painfully sensitive to light. And even if you could get used to such red-eyed misery - contacts don't last forever. Are you going to tote around a year's+ worth of contacts in your survival kit? Hardly.

As for sticking with glasses for the apocalypse? That's a one-way ticket to "Hi, I made it through the first ave of oblivion to humanity only to get sidelined by a wayward zombie bite/ray gun to the face, all because I lack any sort of peripheral vision." Yeah. Great. If I'm going to survive the horrors of an apocalypse, I don't want to go out in the very first scene of the next act because of something so silly. Plus glasses are named as such for a reason as they are - yes, made of glass. Which means they will basically be shattered within a week, tops.

Which leaves me ultimately blind, a sitting duck waiting for the harsh new world to come snuff me out.

So I've decided this potential future dilemma needs to get sorted out before shit hits the fan and it's too late for action. The only REAL answer is to get Lasik surgery on my eyes.

As if - oh yeah, no big deal - I can afford that multi-thousand-dollar procedure any time I damn well please. And though it would be nice to not deal with contacts on a daily basis, my aforementioned reasons are hardly valid explanations for saving up the money, putting off buying a house, not having my dream wedding (to be featured in future posts, for sure), etc.
Not to mention... Lasik is some scary shit, simply put.
Have you seen how it's done?

And that's just a DIAGRAM to explain the procedure, all prettied up to not make you afraid.
I couldn't stomach posting ACTUAL photos from the surgery to my site, because I don't believe in making this blog a destination for masochists and fans of torture porn. (On a side note - the horror movie franchise, which is pretty much directly responsible for this entire post to begin with, could make a killing - har har - on movies about deranged opthamolagists. The shudder factor would be off the charts.) And even with the transparent metallic "suction device"/clamp nonchalantly thrown into the diagram, as if almost an afterthought... I. Am. Scared.

So the real debate I have to come to grips with here is not so much "However will I afford to get my eyes repaired permanently?" That's what winning the lottery is for.

No - the real question is which am I more afraid of? Laser beams and "suctions devices" quite literally IN my eyes? Or hypothetical blindness and death by four horsemen?

To tell you the truth... I'm not sure I even want to survive the apocalypse. It sounds like a real drag.