I had my second operation one week after the first. You can see immediately after the operation. You have to put antibiotic drops in several days before and several days after.
Your doctor might be incompetent, but the advice about cataracts is sound. Everybody’s lenses are slowly sclerosing from the day we’re born, and eventually that will progress to the point that it interferes with our vision in a meaningful way. The changes become visible on exam long before that point, though–they were able to pick up traces on my last exam, and I’m only 36 with a stable nearsighted prescription that corrects to 20/20. Statistically, I’ve likely got about 30 years before I need cataract surgery.
And the driving at night is a painfully common presentation of cataracts in people with no previous eye issues. The opacification of the lens causes glare you didn’t previously have, which can seriously degrade visual acuity. You know how when road salt from slush dries on your windshield and you can see fine, but then the sun comes out or you drive out of the shade and suddenly you can’t see for shit because of the way the salt refracts the light all over the place? It’s like that. People can often see okay just mooching around the house or driving/piddling around outside on a not-especially-sunny day, but you put really bright sunshine or oncoming headlights into the picture, and they’re Mr. Magoo. That’s why they have those little devices that mimic headlights coming at you, to test your vision with glare. If you glare to 20/50 or worse, you’re a candidate for surgery, even if your non-glare vision is 20/15.
Cataract surgery does not leave you with perfect, normal vision. It leaves your eyes with a fixed focus. If you are lucky, that will provide good focus at one particular distance, but not others. (I have had both eyes done; one has pretty good uncorrected distance vision now, but the other, not so much. Both the eyes need glasses for reading or anything close, so I am constantly whipping my glasses on and off, and I need bifocals just so I can read print and use the computer at the same time.)
If you had the surgery before the cataract got too bad, it would actually be making your vision worse (even on a best case scenario). At least, with a mild cataract, you can still change the eye’s focus.
Well its best to be sure . Early diagnosis means ‘we think its’.
This makes no sense. Cataract surgery is always done to improve vision. AFAIK there is no other reason for it. Are cataracts a health hazard?
That’s not the reason here. When I had mine, I could have had it next week after I talked to the doc. I opted for a month or so later, to mesh better with my schedule.
Very bad advice.
Like any surgery, cataract surgery is a good thing to have when you need it. It is a bad thing to have before you really need it. It does not, by any means, leave you with perfect, normal vision, and if you have it too soon, your vision will be worse, not better.
As surgeries go, however, it is safe and effective.
I have had it done on both eyes, but only because I really did need it. I live every day with the very real downside of not being able to change the focus of my eyes. This is a real pain because it requires me to wear bifocals for many tasks, and to be frequently putting on and removing glasses. It is very difficult, I have found, to get a pair of glasses that provide me adequate focus for long periods of work at the computer screen. I am better off than I was when my lenses were all clouded up, but I am certainly considerably worse off than I was before they started clouding, or even when they were only slightly cloudy.
Interesting. I had my cataract surgery about a year ago. My vision before it was -13/-14 diopters. After, I am 20/20. Granted, I used to be able (as myopic people do) to see extremely well at very short distances. Now I need glasses for small print. I also prefer glasses (+1.5 or so) to read, but I can read without glasses too, although it is not as comfortable and I have to hold the book/kindle at arms length.
Since I did wear glasses all my life before the surgery, it is not an undue burden to have to wear glasses to read or do closeup work, and having 20/20 distance vision is an amazing thing after 45 or so years of having to wear glasses all the time.
And since my glasses now cost $3 vs $500 when I had myopia, I just bought 5 of them and seeded them around the house.
Perhaps I should have been more precise. FDA would not allow cataract surgery just to improve vision when other means to obtain the same end are available: eye glasses, RK, PRK, lasik, etc. Cataract surgery could not be had until the cataracts are “ripe.”
You misunderstood. They don’t do both eyes at once. They wait two weeks, as mentioned. Within a few hours of having the surgery, the anesthetic wears off and you can see normally. You have an exam the next day to make sure everything is doing okay, and to see where your vision is operating, then another exam a week later with your own doc. Mine was at 20/15 in that eye. They want to make sure you’re not having any problems with healing before doing the second surgery.
I am 56 and began getting very blurry vision about 4 years ago. At first, I thought that the optometrists I had tried out were no good, because any lense prescribed for me just wouldn’t be clear enough for my right eye to clearly see tv or my laptop. Finally, 2 years ago, one optometrist told me that I was getting the first signs of cataracts, and that this could be causing this blurriness. I read alot about symtoms online, meanwhile.
Recently, I visited a new opthamologist. He told me that I had cataracts which were not far developed, but could be interfering with my vision. He tried a few prescription lenses on me, but the results looked dismal. So, I started a conversation about surgery.
I am only 56. I ski, I run, and I am on the computer daily. I find that when I ski or drive, I have a very hard time focusing, and I strain to gain prospective. When my son is playing football, I cannot see the numbers on the jerseys to pick him out. When my other son is swimming, I cannot tell if he dove off the board yet, and someone else has to pick him out for me. Furthermore, I get headaches trying to work on the computer or watch TV. My right eye is so bad compared to my left, and I feel completely imbalanced when trying to focus.
This level of vision failure is unacceptable to a young 56 year old such as myself.
I am willing to risk any complications to see without everything being in double vision. I have not heard that cataract surgery results in blindness, so what is there to lose? For me, the risks are worth it.
My opthamologist told me that it causes less complications for cataract surgery in patients who do not have severe cataracts. He told me that the surgery is easier to perform. I hope he is right!
The notion you apparently have that cataract surgery is risk free and has no downsides is nonsense. It could certainly leave your vision a lot worse off than before if the surgeon screws up (which is unlikely, but far from impossible), and even if it all goes perfectly it will leave you unable to adjust the focus of your eyes to different distances. You will probably have to deal with either bifocal or multifocal glasses (even if you do not need glasses now), neither of which are without their disadvantages. (I believe that there are now some techniques that allow for some limited degree of control of focus within the eyes after the surgery, but from what I hear they are both expensive and of limited effectiveness. Even paying top dollar, you won’t get your old eyes back.)
Anyone who has the surgery before they really need it is a fool. I had cataract surgery in my 40s (because I really did need it). My sight is very far from being as good as it was before the cataracts developed, or even when they were still only mild. Getting a pair of glasses that allow me to use the computer comfortably has proven especially difficult. I have one pair that works reasonably well, out of about six or seven tries with various different optometrists.
Define “really”. It’s a subjective decision based on what degree of difficulty you feel like putting up with. If a person does a lot of night driving, he’s probably going to want to have the surgery earlier than someone who doesn’t. I waited until I was having to change my prescription every six months, so it was a dollar decision as much as anything else.
Took three months just to get an appointment at the VA and another three months to finish the job on one eye at a time, but that’s the VA.
They did a great job and were very nice. Took a few days, but life is beautiful when you can see, especially at night. I was almost completely blind in one eye.
Huh. Funny that this was resurrected tonight, as I’ve been watching a bunch of cataract removal videos on YouTube with my husband, who is scheduled to have a posterior subcapsular cataract removed in the morning.
His came on very quickly, and it’s a “swiss cheese” kind of cataract - one with a lacelike fogging of the back of the lens. He complained for about a week that his glasses had a scratch in them, and then woke up one morning with greatly impaired vision. Of course we were concerned about a stroke or a retinal detachment or something, so we took him to the ER at the VA and they trotted him up to ophthalmology toot sweet. That’s when we learned of the cataract, and were told it was a fast growing kind and they scheduled him for a referral to the eye surgeon. That was at the beginning of August. Saw the surgeon last week and was put on the waiting list and scheduled for Oct. 29, and they called this morning to tell him he’d been bumped up to tomorrow morning. (I hope that doesn’t mean something bad happened to the vets who were scheduled before him.)
Visual impairment was definitely the rubric they are using for deciding when to do surgery, as well as the amount of “glare” he saw at night and another funny symptom - when asked to do that color blindness test where you find the number in the colored dots, he failed miserably with the light on, and did much better with the lights off and just a dim flashlight on the page.
So, anyhow, that’s my anecdote. Please cross all available appendages that all goes well. He’s only got the one good eye, and of course that’s the one the cataract chose to grow in. While I know it’s a relatively low-risk procedure, I do have a couple of patients for whom cataract surgery didn’t go well and they ended up blind. 
I’m keeping that to myself - he’s already nervous enough.
The problem is that the powers that be consider your wish to start your day with clear vision without needing to add corrective lenses to be cosmetic.
I agree, past a certain point “corrective lenses” are more than merely cosmetic. Without mine I don’t function terribly well either. Unfortunately for us, we aren’t making the rules.
Let me second this motion.
The eye doctor recommended cataract surgery for me. I found out the hard way that I am one of the tiny minority where something goes wrong. I’m still wearing expensive variable focus glasses, only now I get multiple concentric rings around lights instead of just a little blurriness. I also developed a rare cornea disorder after the surgery which took months to heal. I wish I’d never had the surgery, and will not have the other eye done unless the cataract becomes opaque.
This was done by a top-notch highly regarded eye surgery group, and there was no malpractice, just bad luck as far as I can tell.
Sure, it s a mater of judgement when to go for it, and different people’s needs will vary. However, I still think it is important to recognize that there are real risks and serious downsides to the treatment (even if entirely successful). Contrary to what some of the people in the thread seem to be implying, if your doctor advises you to delay, that is almost certainly good advice, and they almost certainly have your best interests at heart.
Most of the time. Sometimes, though, an eye doctor (like mine) is not keeping up on the literature it seems, or is a little too profit motivated. He told me, “Oh, Medicare won’t pay for cataracts until they’re ‘ripe’.” Turns out that that is total horseshit, and has been total horseshit for a long time (like since cataracts became routine surgery quite some time ago). IMO, he was milking exam visits and profit on lenses and frames.
But you’re right about risk. I’ve heard horror stories from friends who had the surgery.
I had both eyes done when I was in my 60s. I was the youngest person at the clinic. The NHS will only recommended it if your loss of vision has a significant effect on your daily activities, such as driving or reading. It is the most common operation here too, with some 300,000 procedures every year.
Anyone who wants to know more about what cataracts are, the causes of them, and the treatment, could look here. It is NHS related but the description is universal.