The Saga of the Shower, Continued (yes, it continues)

You may remember the nightmare of my shower remodel last summer.  It took from May until August to get my floor resloped (which ended up not being resloped at all) and to get a glass door installed.  I decided to live with the bad floor and just keep mopping out after every shower, and at least I had the door in.
What I never reported on, though, was that about a month after it was all finished, I noticed that the door was leaking and water was getting underneath the tiles,causing them to lift up a little bit, I imagine because the wood underneath was swelling and warping.  So I just stopped using that shower all together.  I was done. I gave up. That was it. Since then I've been using an upstairs shower.
But I decided I couldn't accept defeat forever, so I revisited the situation this summer.  A few weeks ago I called a remodeling company and got an estimate.  When the guy came to do the estimate, I gave him a very quick summary of my nightmare.  He asked how much the first guy had charged, and then was clearly nervous to give me his estimate.  I told him that I realized the first job was a joke and I was ready to spend more this time, so he should just let me have it.  And he did.  This time around it would cost me about 10 times what I paid last summer.  But it would be done for real.  And it would come with a two-year warranty.  So I signed up for it.  This time, rather than just replace two tiles (the wrong tiles), they would take out the whole floor, reslope everything, and then put in new tiles. And they would take care of the door while they were at it.
Over this last week the guy has been coming while I've been at work (he's Italian, so technically I have an Italian shower now, right?). He came after I left each morning and was gone by the time I got home, so I would just see the day's work and hope it was going well.  By the end, it looked spectacular.  Today I took my first shower (I wanted to give it a few days to make sure everything was dried and sealed), and I think it's a winner!  The water all drained, I didn't have to mop anything, and there was no water outside the door afterwards!  Woohoo!  This may (better be) the last time you all have to hear about my shower!
Unfortunately, with this and Lasik all at once, any fancy toys I had my eyes on (Corvette) will have to wait a while, or for my trust fund to make itself known.

Looks almost just like last year, but if you look carefully, you'll see one difference- no mop hanging on the wall!

You can see how the floor actually slopes toward the drain, not toward a few inches in front of the drain. Genius!

I Can See Clearly Now

As long as I’ve known about vision correction surgery, I’ve been uninterested in it.  My thought was that it was easy enough to correct my vision with contacts and glasses, so it wasn’t really worth the risk of slicing and dicing my eyes for possibly better vision.  But last year when I went to the eye doctor I bought just enough contacts to last me exactly one year.  I wasn’t really thinking about getting surgery, but in the back of my mind I was suddenly leaving that door open.  And in the past year my contacts have been annoying me more and more.  It’s a real bummer always trying to plan around them.  Am I going to be out late tonight?  Should I bring a contact case and some solution and my glasses in case my contacts get dried out?  Should I just wear glasses to wherever I’m going?  Will pictures be taken and will I mind being in glasses in those pictures forever?  It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but contacts and glasses really have become a big part of my life.  So over the past few months the idea of surgery has been creeping into my mind. 

I finally made a consultation appointment at one of the surgical centers in the valley for last week.  It was just a consultation.  The doctor’s office sent me a bunch of brochures ahead of time so I could know what to expect.  Those brochures, along with everything I was finding online, detailed the three most common vision correction surgeries: lasik, which is the simplest surgery and has the fastest recovery, but is for people with only the most basic vision problems and pretty good eye conditions; prk, which needs a few days recovery and is for people with worse vision; and ICL, which is the most complicated: it’s an implanted contact lens, and is for people with big pupils, dry eyes, and is twice as expensive.  My eye doctor has always told me that I have big pupils, and I know from life that I have dry eyes, so I was pretty confident that during my consultation the doctor would tell me I was only a candidate for ICL, which I wasn’t interested in doing, and I could live in peace knowing I had tried but it wasn’t worth the trouble.  So this consultation didn’t seem like a very big deal to me.  And then the doctor threw me for a loop. 

Oh, but first a tangent.  One of the tests during the exam was to form a triangle with both hands and look through it, then put it my hands in my lap (still with the triangle) and then look through it with the other eye.  I don’t know what this is supposed to test, but it turns out I’m ambidextrous.  Apparently, most people have to readjust their hands or have trouble finding their other eye.  I just went straight from eye to lap to eye with no problem.  So, neat. 

Anyway, after the technician ran all the tests and told me she thought I was a better candidate for PRK than lasik, the doctor came in and said I looked like a perfect candidate for lasik.  I was shocked.  I really wasn’t expecting that.  I asked a few questions, and she had good answers for all of them.  So I went out to the front desk to see when I could schedule a surgery.  I was expecting a couple months to still wrap my head around this.  I still hadn’t even decided if I wanted surgery.  I was only looking into the idea.  But they had an opening that Friday- four days later!  The idea of being able to see by the weekend was too much to resist, so I signed up (plus, it was the last day of their summer special pricing). 

I spent the rest of last week freaking out about whether I was making the right choice or if I was risking good enough vision with the possibility of losing it all.  By Friday I was mostly convinced that lasik was a good thing, but still not totally sure.  But I went anyway.  The surgery was gross.  Fast but gross.  Afterwards, I had to sit in the waiting room for a couple hours so the doctor could do a follow up before I left.  So I sat there with plastic shields taped to my face to keep me from touching my eyes (yep, like a dog with a cone on my head), putting eye drops in every 20 minutes.  After 2 hours, the doctor had me read some letters on the opposite wall of her exam room (I could read almost nothing, but she told me I was seeing 20/40 already, so whatever), and then my hometeacher and his wife came and picked me up (I had driven straight from work, so I needed two people- one to drive me and my car and one to drive their car).  I spent the rest of Friday night putting in eye drops every 20 minutes and retaping the plastic shields on.   It was really glamorous.  But nothing compared to the next morning when I woke up with my eyes crusted completely shut.  Super cute.  Once I broke through the grossness though, I could see!  I walked around my house marveling at how I could see clocks from a distance, I could tell when a spot on the floor was just the carpet being rubbed the wrong way and not a spider, I could see license plates on the cars outside!  It’s fantastic!  My eyes still hurt and I’m still doing a lot of eye drops, but it’s getting better each day.  Mostly it’s just fantastic!  I think the worst side effect is that I’m going to have to start cleaning my shower.  Because I can see it now.