I already have some pretty serious PVD and am worried about this news. I know there have been some experimental surgeries to remove the floaters. Now, I will do the research to see if it has become more routine because I can see myself needing it even before I am granted the chance to deal with the cataracts.
To top it off, I think I’ve mentioned that I have already had partial detachment once. Thankfully, it healed.
Thanks S_S.
My doctor told me there was a procedure to remove the floaters but that it was extremely risky, so she would not recommend it. But if you’ve already had PVD, can it happen again? The gel back there has already peeled away. It does not grow back, does it?
It can get worse as more of the gel breaks away. I have a theory that optometrists use to deny but don’t seem to any more. I had Lasik surgery to correct my astigmatism. During that procedure, they press your eye down to hold it still. I think that pressure caused my floaters due to the temporary change in eye shape. And even though all the medical advice on the web says that we will quit noticing them in time, this has been 20 years and I still see them cross my vision.
The effect is not good. One time I didn’t see a light turn green because my big floater was in the way. There have been a few times, when I’ve had to roll my eyes to get floaters to move so I can read either the printed word or electronic stuff. Not cool. Plus the flashes that still occur since my partial detachment. I am very, very afraid of losing my vision so I’m leery of surgery. But leaving the floaters there is scary, too.
That’s a little scary!!!
I have not noticed any particular increase in floaters since my surgery. Maybe a bit after I had the posterior capsulotomy a few months after the cataract surgery (a common problem, and no surprise).
I had one persistent one in one eye for years beforehand - it did not move around, and was always in one particular spot. Like a little black pinpoint speck. I usually don’t even notice it. Neither the ophthalmologist nor the optometrist were ever concerned about it.
I had once read about a treatment involving zapping the floaters with a laser. I asked the ophthalmologist about it and she did not recommend it in my case, and the one was such a minor thing - and she said that basically everyone who had that treatment developed cataracts as a result!
Since that conversation was well before I developed my cataracts, and I never had the treatment, they’re obviously unrelated in my case.
As far as the PVD, and retinal detachment: those are pretty scary, though compare those risks (which can be treated) with the potential complete loss of vision due to the cataracts themselves.
Although my link said the floaters would eventually diminish or go away, my doctor said they probably would stay but that my brain would filter them out. In my case that is what is already happening, so it is a very minor annoyance. I still see tons better than before the procedure. As long as I do not have retinal detachment, and remember that the vast majority of people experiencing PVD apparently do not, then I’m still satisfied.
I too noticed an increased floater presence post-surgery, but it lasted only a week or so. Now I’m back to my default floater state.
I really only notice them when I’m looking at a screen, but they do annoy me. I wish there was an easy, reliable treatment available.
mmm
I had PVD, and got a lot of floaters. They told me they would go away, and i don’t think they did. But my brain does mostly filter them out.
They asked me at a lot of visits about floaters, and i said, “i still have a lot, but they aren’t any worse”, and they were satisfied that that wasn’t a cause for concern, anyway.
I went in to see my ophthalmologist a couple weeks early yesterday, as last Saturday morning I started seeing flashes of light in my right eye. No floaters there though, but a slight increase in floaters in my left. And while they the light flashes in my left eye have decreased, there are still some. It seems my right eye is starting to experience the expected other PVD. But both retinas look fine for the moment, and barring anything dramatic I’ll go back in three months for another look.
A little disappointing though is my distance vision has gone from perfect to near-perfect. It’s been a week since I saw absolutely perfectly with it all day long. Now it tends to fluctuate. Just not as sharp a lot of the time. My doctor said vision is the sharpest right after surgery but usually changes as the eye heals. They have no way of knowing how the eye will heal, so they cannot make allowance for that. It’s usually not a problem, and I don’t want to be a whiner, because I still see near-perfect now while before I was blind as a bat. The doc said if it turns out in three months that it bothers me, because it will have definitely settled down by then, then maybe I can get some glasses if I feel the need. Also said I have a little astigmatism left, and that’s causing it too, they were not able to eliminate the astigmatism completely.
My doctor also said my near-vision eye, my reading eye, looks a little hazy. Said it looks like I might have a secondary cataract developing, which happens a lot after surgery. Can take months or years to develop. It’s not affecting my vision now, but if and when it does, the doctor said they could laser it out, and it does not occur again.
So the secondary cataract is in the new lens?
Whew! Glad it is treatable. I do know someone who completely lost vision in one eye after surgery and was unable to get it back so I’m quite leery of this. But I’m more leery of going blind.
Yep - PCO (Posterior Capsular Opacification).
Weirdly, the younger you are, the likelier you are to develop it; the doc said that when they’ve done cataract surgery on babies, it’s nearly 100% that the baby will develop this.
It was no great surprise when I developed it; I had both eyes dealt with about a year after the original surgery.
Well yay, I’m on the way to being an active participant in this thread. I’ve worn glasses as long as I can remember, but my left eye had suddenly gotten hazy, and yes it turns out I have cataract.
My ophthalmologist told me I could just do some basic correction to the one eye and continue wearing glasses (but take off my glasses to read as I currently do), or have both eyes done, get great distance vision, but need readers. I lean toward keeping the glasses, but I need to learn more.
I’ll get a lot more information when I have an appointment (early next year, most likely), but in the meantime it’s certainly helpful having this thread to read through.
There are a lot of options these days. Do the research.
I say if you’re going to do it, do it right. Get both eyes done with lens implants. They lasered away my astigmatism, so I don’t even need readers now. Almost four months on, and my eyes have settled down nicely, posterior vitreous detachments notwithstanding. I barely notice the floaters anymore. One of the best decisions I’ve made.
Oh - and on this specific topic: there may well have been something else other than “just” PCO in the friend’s case; while cataract surgery is extremely common, and generally extremely safe and effective, in a very small percentage of cases something does go wrong. Sucks if you’re in that tiny percentage though ;(. The friend who had surgery a few months after I did, developed blurring a few days after #2. Rushed to the doctor, and her eye pressure had gone far north of where it should have gone. Fortunately she had it handled quickly and I think eyedrops solved it.
I second the suggestion to “do it right”. My optometrist recommended that if I have one done, have the other done fairly soon after (it had the beginnings of a cataract but was nowhere near as bad as the bad eye) partly because the brain sort of rewires itself to handle the changed vision. Not that you couldn’t rewire for the second eye, later on, but they seemed to think it was best done in a short period.
What you definitely want to do is consider how you currently use glasses - e.g. distance only, reading only, etc., and what you want to be able to do afterward without glasses. Also, do you use progressive lenses for anything now? And, what’s your budget if you want to get upgraded implants - e.g. multifocal? (I don’t know whether toric, for astigmatism, is covered by insurance), or if you want to have laser-assisted surgery?
My mother-in-law told the doctor that she wanted to have enough close-up vision to be able to tweeze those stray hairs 
I wanted to be able to do at least SOME things without glasses.
When I was trying to decide what kind of lenses to get, my then-ophtho suggested that, given my issues with progressive eyeglasses, I might have trouble dealing with multifocal implants. Very good point - can’t exactly send the eyeballs back to be re-ground if I can’t tolerate it! But I pointed out that I’d been able to use room-distance multifocals OK (good for close-up, and computer, and a bit beyond that, but NOT enough for driving).
I ultimately decided to go for multifocals, but the “low-add” sort - which means I have good distance vision, and decent medium-distance vision e.g. to see the car’s dashboard (something I had trouble with, when using distance-only eyeglasses). And cheap reading glasses lying everywhere around the house - but since I use an e-reader (backlit, and font can be enlarged) I almost never need them. I can usually get by with adjusting the device I’m using, or turning on some lights, or even with a “reading glasses” app on my phone (uses the camera to display an enlarged image of what I’m trying to see).
The only “real” glasses I have are for the computer - and they really do a better job than drugstore reading glasses.
Full-on multifocals (which let you see distance AND close-up) would seem to me to be the worst of both worlds in that you can ONLY see close-up and in the distance; anything intermediate would be a problem, I think, though I could be wrong (others will know more about that than me).
Another option, if you get both eyes done, is to have one done for distance and one for close-up. I’ve heard of people doing that, both for Lasik and for cataract surgery, and it horrified me, until I realized that due to the cataract, I’d basically been functioning that way for a year. So, that was actually something I seriously considered.
Both my optician and my ophthalmologist tell me that people who are used to being able to see close up, and who have needed lenses to see distance for many years, and give up near vision for clear distance vision, are often unhappy about it. You need to rewire how you interact with the world.
This option had been getting better, but it’s not clear to me how well it works currently.
That horrified me, too, until i did it with swim goggles. (Which, oddly, you can buy without a prescription in any strength you want.) When i put them on it takes me a few minutes to get used to it, and the visual vision is mediocre (but not zero, even a blurry image helps with depth perception) and it’s really nice to be able to read my watch and also recognize my husband at a distance.
I was surprised at how well, and largely seamless, they have been for me. There is a little bit of haloing at night, but it’s gotten better since I first got the lenses.
I think the full multifocals - that cover reading and distance, but not as much of the intermediate area, would be harder for me to deal with - seems like you’d have good (close), good (far), mediocre (intermediate) - but presumably people do manage with it.
Note that this is a very different thing from the accommodating lenses - that supposedly work with the eye’s natural muscles. Those aren’t supposed to work all that well.
There’s a newer multifocal that had been getting good reviews back when I was looking (I think Enipla got it) but my eye doc suggested I go with a slightly older one, because there was longer experience with it and he knew it would hold up well.
Well, it has been almost three years…
After a pandemic driven delay I finally started cataract surgery. 17 days post surgery on the first eye and things are great. Surgery was a nothing burger - kind of like a light show as they broke up the old lens with a laser and extracted it. No pain, brighter, more colorful etc. as others report.
As I said up-thread, I am one of those who is accustomed to reading without correction and wanted to preserve that, even if it meant using distance correction. I had to change ophthalmologists and the new one was not a fan of mono-vision. He suggested a ‘mini-monovision’ approach using extended range lenses. He explained that approach would not be as jarring as having a very different correction in each eye.
So, I opted for a Vivity extended range lens with my left eye biased for reading correction and my right, dominant eye set for distance correction.
My right eye will be done for distance in a few weeks but I am simulating that with eyeglasses with just one lens. I can still read all but the smallest text without readers and distance vision is very good.
The extra cost seems worth it, even though I have not figured out how to activate the x-ray and heat vision options that must be a feature of such pricey lenses…
Here is an explanation of the lens I chose.
Thank you for the link. That helps me understand multifocals much better.