Thanks; that’s pretty much what I had guessed. It took about 4 weeks to schedule the first surgery, so I’ll probably wait until I actually notice any decreased vision in my left eye. Again, I think I went into this whole thing too soon.
As it turns out, my original question, regarding which lens to choose for the replacement, turns out to have been irrelevant – I would have had the same problems regardless of which one I chose. I could probably have just gotten the plain vanilla monofocus lens and saved myself the cost of the fancy one.
My surgeon told me that an eye needed to be able to be corrected to less than 20/30 in order for them to do the surgery. I was concerned since one eye was signifigantly worse than the other the they would only correct the one eye but since the better eye was at 20/30 I had both done.
I did not worry that my eyesight would casue me to walk in front of a car or anything like that but i couln’t read road signs at all so if I didn’t know where I was going I was in trouble. I went on a trip just before my first dr appt and I was stunned at how little I could see at a distance.
My cataracts also progressed very quickly as in November I had both eyes corrected to 20/30 and by April my left eye was almost completely blurred even with the previously corrected lenses.
When my vision started to get really bad, I had some remarkable experiences. I was about to cross a road which had a tall building next to it. The building’s shadow was across the road. I saw a car coming and when it went into the shadow, from my perspective it literally disappeared. A second or two later when it came out of the shadow, it was as if it was being reconstituted from thin air.
I just happened to see all this at a moment when I wasn’t endangered. Had things been a little different and I hadn’t seen the car before it went into the shadow, I might have been hit. Also, it was a very powerful warning of just how bad my vision had gotten.
As it was, I stood there for a bit to enjoy the experience of watching cars vanish and reappear.
I had something called “rapid onset” cataracts. I went from normal vision to being no longer able to drive and not even safe crossing the street in about 6 months. That compares to ten or twenty years for normal cataracts.
I was terrified that I was going blind – I had no advance alert from an eye doc that sooner or later I would need the surgery. While I had no idea what the problem was, I did know that all the other kinds of progressive blindness were pretty much incurable. So I was especially stupid – I didn’t go to a doc for much longer than I knew there was a problem because I was afraid of what they’d tell me. I also drove waaayyyy longer than I should have – I had to drive to get to work, and I was afraid I’d kill somebody. I developed a strategy. I tailgated the car in front of me. I could see the brake light coming on so I could stop, but I probably wouldn’t see pedestrians coming in from the side, so I figured if I tailgated no one would be stupid enough to try fitting between me and the car ahead. It worked, but in retrospect it was incredibly stupid.
