I had cataract surgery on the second eye yesterday.
For years, my ophthalmologist has been telling me that I'd got cataracts, and they may affect my night vision, but they weren't enough to work on yet. Finally, at my routine annual visit in March (and how privileged am I, in this benighted and broken US healthcare system, to be able to have routine annual eye and vision visits!), I complained about night driving, and the doc agreed to set me up for surgery.
There was a five-month lead time (the doc is, apparently, busy). I improved upon the time by allowing my anxiety to take over (regular readers will know that I have anxiety in various strengths and industrial quantities). I can fall into the anxiety hole over a multitude of topics, including midnight rehashes of occurrences from decades ago with people who likely could never find me again (and completely don't care, I'm sure), but eyes are special. I have a grotesque fascination with eyes in general. For my own eyes, I have a combination of gross-out and fear of losing vision (I've said for decades that the reason I never used contact lenses, is that there are not enough drugs in the world to get me to put something into my open eye).
When not stuck in that anxiety hole, I did research on the types of lenses available. A cataract is a discoloration of the natural lens that you grew yourself, and it can get bad enough that the lens is opaque (and you go blind). During WWII, a physician treating pilots discovered that, when pilots got shards of the plastic from which the cockpit windows were made into their eyes, the pilots did not have an immune system response; they body did not treat these as infections. Thus, lenses made of this plastic could be used to replace your natural lens. You can't flex these lenses, as your body does with your natural lens to change the focal distance and see both near and far away... but you are able to see, and can use glasses to compensate for the distance vision needs.
But the lenses are plastic, right? So the shape of the insertable lenses can be made to allow for the same problems that are managed by your glasses, including astigmatism and presbyopia (presbyopia is the loss of close-up vision due to aging, and astigmatism has something to do with the angle that the light comes into your eye, and I admit I don't really understand astigmatism). So (for additional cost, of course) you can get lenses that allow for either distance or close vision, that manage astigmatism... and now, that give you vision at every range, or at some limited set of ranges rather than just distance. You don't get nothin' for nothin', of course, so you make your choice based on what's important to you.
To me, night driving was (is?) the most important, and the lenses that completely free you from any dependence on glasses, have effects around bight lights that might interfere with driving. The lens that gave me one range of vision is also available to fix my astigmatism... but there was another choice, that gives some intermediate vision, without the glare effects of the all-vision lenses. They have a reputation for giving less contrast than the single-vision lenses... but I'm not comparing to single vision lenses; I'm comparing to the lens-with-cataract I had.
The ophthalmologist said I was a good candidate for these intermediate vision lenses, so I went with those.
After the first surgery, I wrote this too-long report to a friend:
Eyes: well, for the first time in 50 years or more, I see 20/20 out of my right eye. I popped for an extended depth-of-field lens, and that hasn't improved yet, but the doc says to give it a few days. I've taken the right lens out of an older pair of glasses, and, while I feel a right fool with them on, I was able to drive in them. I know I'll need reading glasses, and OTC (over-the-counter, for those who didn't spend decades up to their knees in drug-talk) "cheaters" at 2.5 seem to be working. They're too much for the computer, but some 1.5's seem to be ok for that, for now (and if the extended depth-of-field lenses kick in, I may not need even those). I've got sunglasses with 2.5 and 2.0 bifocal sections so that I can read the GPS, but both of those may be too strong... it's too soon to tell. In other news, the surgery site is irritated, but responds well to the prescribed eye drops. As far as the night vision goes, I'll have to check that later (it was too soon post-surgery last night). I CAN see a color-shift; the image in the untreated eye is yellower, and the image through the new lens is whiter and bluer.
(Those one-lens-in glasses got to be a particular bête noir; I have enough eccentricities and weirdnesses without walking around the Stop&Shop with glasses with one lens missing...)
In the weeks between the surgeries, I didn't have enough varieties of night driving experience to notice whether the vision had improved much. (Driving just after the beginning of a nighttime heavy rain was the worst trouble I had, and the weather has been dry...)
Now it's the morning after the second surgery. I still haven't had enough night driving experience to see if that has changed, and vision improvements after cataract surgery sometimes take a few weeks to develop, anyway. But I have been working on the computer this morning (including composing this post) without glasses. I still need glasses for tiny text, and for the phone... but for my mid-range vision, this is a remarkable improvement. Contrast appears improved. And the blue shift in my color vision, noted above, is even more evident (cataracts tend to give things a yellow cast, changing the way we see color). So early reports of the cataract surgery results are not only positive, but impressive.
I need to write also about the experience of the surgery itself. I have made a real bore of myself, complaining to all who would stand still long enough to listen about my worries. I had visions (did I intend that pun?) of surgeons coming after my open eye with scalpels, shovels, and backhoes. It wasn't like that at all. First, of course, I was anaesthetized... but also, they put so much gel (anaesthetic and antiseptic) in my eyes that I couldn't focus much anyway, and then, the surgeon comes at the eye from the side, out of the regular line of sight. While I was awake for the process, and could hear what was supposed to be happening, the process of the surgery was far less gruesome than I'd feared.
I'm writing this at stupid:30 in the morning before my post-surgery visit. I expect to hear good news about the surgery outcome. I'm certainly happy with it, right now.
