I got fitted for a new eye today

After almost a month of healing, I went to an ocularist who is going to fabricate a new eye for me. Ever since the surgery, I'd been keeping this clear plastic conformer in the eye to help the socket keep its shape and to somehow promote the healing of the implant they put in there.

My eye doctor told me to practice taking the conformer out with a tiny suction cup and putting it back in, not only for practice, but to help keep things clean in there. Well, I was kinda grossed out by it, and never did it more than 2 or 3 times in the past month. I've just kept it covered up with a black eyepatch so I wouldn't have to think about it. One time, the patch came off while I was sleeping and the conformer fell out of my eye. We searched the sheets for 30 minutes before I found it at the foot of the bed

Anyways, I arrived at this guy's office, and when they called me back to the room, I was put in a chair that looked like a dentist's chair. The technician came back to introduce herself to me, and told me what the procedure was going to be like. She started off by removing the conformer with another little suction cup, and cleaned it off real good in some cleanser. She then started to clean out the eye socket with a mild soapy solution. It was a really gross feeling, because she would basically fill the socket up with water, and then use a little vacuum to suck all the water out. One time she got a little too close and poked the back of my eye socket. That hurt like a motherfucker.

Once everything was clean, she started to mix up this mixture of plaster and other kinds of coagulants, which was described to me as the same material used to make a mold of your teeth when you get braces. She was going to fill my eye socket up with that goop to make a mold of my eye.

Once she got the stuff to the right consistency, she scooped a whole bunch of it on a spatula and started to slather it all inside the eye socket. I don't know how she fit all of that in there, but she did, and had to sit perfectly still for 4 minutes while it solidified. Now, I've felt a lot of gross, disgusting things in my life, but feeling this cold putty going into a place where my eyeball used to be is probably the most disgusting feeling I've ever had in my life.

After the 4 minutes was up, she started to tap on the mold to see how firm it was. She decided to let it sit for another minute or two before she removed it. It was pretty awkward trying to talk to the technician while she was holding my head still. She was all like, how's your day going? And I couldn't help but say something along the lines about how it was going great, and how I was so excited to have my eye socket filled with this disgusting goop.

Finally, the mold had set, and she worked on carefully removing it from the socket, not to cause me any discomfort, but also to protect the mold. She looked at it, and that she would take it back to the lab for processing, and to wait for the ocularist to meet with me. She washed out the socket once again, removing bits of plaster that had flaked off, and sat me upright in the chair. She started laughing, and pretended to be all flattered. I said I didn't understand, and she said that I was winking at her. She said she was joking, and reminded me that my eyelid was shut because there was nothing in the socket. I couldn't tell that it was shut, and tried to open it with no luck

About 30 minutes later, the ocularist came in, introduced himself to me, and showed me what he had been working on in the lab. He somehow took the mold from my eye, and made a firm, waxy lens-shaped mold of what he said my eye would look like. The wax allowed him to put it in, see how it fit, and make changes before he sent it off to be made.

We started the process of sculpting the pink wax as he continually would put it in the socket, take it out, and repeat. Over and over and over he would ask me how it felt, if I could open and close my eyelid (I couldn't tell, he just asked me to try to and he would see if it was open or closed). The wax mold, after he tweaked with it for about 20 minutes, actually didn't feel uncomfortable when it was in me, and was 10x better than that generic conformer I had been wearing.

He said that he has all he needs to make my final eye, and said I was good to go. Unfortunately, he put the uncomfortable conformer back in my eye and said to keep it in until next week when the eye was made. Before he let me leave, he took several pictures of my remaining eye to get an idea of the color and how it looked so that he could start painting the acrylic eye once it was made.

So, with all that said and done, it looks like I'll have my new eye made and installed by late next week (or the week after) contingent to another final fitting when I go in next week. I made sure that he knew I was going to be leaving the country in mid-December for Christmas, and that I needed to look as normal as possible when I meet a lot of my girlfriend's family and friends in Italy (read: NO EYE PATCH). He said he understood completely, and that he would do his best (as if he wouldn't do that anyways).