Scrape Away the Blindness

My dad recently had corrective laser eye surgery, and I had the opportunity to watch the procedure on closed-circuit television from the next room. When I first learned that I had this option, I was pretty psyched. I am not typically squeamish about things like that, and I thought it would be really cool to see it so close up. The nurse-like lady led my mom and I into a conference room where we sat in front of a blank televisions screen. After a few minutes, they turned on the camera. The entire screen was filled with my dad's severely bloodshot eye. His eyelids were taped open and the doctor was inserting this metal-looking pronged thing underneath his eyelids to hold them in place. At the same time, the doctor was (in a thick Indian accent) talking to us and telling us exactly what he was doing.

My dad was not a candidate for LASIK surgery and was undergoing a different, "safer" type of corrective surgery. During this type of surgery, before the laser-ing can be done, the doctor must scrape away the top layer of the cornea - and, let me tell you, scrape he did. Now, this is the point where I nearly threw up in my mouth. I yelled "UUUGGGHHH!!!!" and hid my eyes in my ball of yarn (I was knitting!) From that point on, I occasionally looked at the t.v. only to immediately return my face to the yarn with a squeal. For the second eye, I had to just turn my chair around so I couldn't see it. I felt sick for the next hour.

I am not sure why it bothered me so much or why the thought of the scraping makes my stomach turn even now. Apparently, it was much worse for me than it was for my dad. He didn't feel (or see) any of the scraping, and he gets the benefit of corrected vision. I, on the other hand, have nothing more than a permanent mental picture of the scraping and bad eyesight. Tell me how that's fair?