Cataract Surgery, A friendly guide to

This is my experience, of course.  Yours may vary, although I imagine mine was fairly standard.  I had mine on Tue. Nov. 3, which puts that date in the history books.  There was something else going on that day, but I can't remember what it was, some minor political scuffle.

Like a colonoscopy, cataract surgery (hereafter called c.s. for brevity's sake) is one of those procedures which sound much ickier than it actually is.  And, like a colonoscopy, it's the prep that's actually a bit more challenging and, in the case of c.s., a lot more time consuming.  It consists of putting 3 different drops into one's eye 4 times a day with 5 minutes in between each drop for 3 days pre-op and 7 days post-op.  Eye drop times come to rather dominate one's schedule, but they're painless, as long as you don't poke your eye with a dropper.  P.S. Don't poke your eye with a dropper.

The surgery itself goes fairly quickly.  One is given a mild relaxant and, off course, the eyeball is numbed, as it must be, since it's going to be sliced open, a tiny incision.  From what I understand, the old lens is broken up and sucked out and a new one inserted.  It's all rather mysterious to me; that it's even possible seems rather miraculous.  There's a lot about the current era that I don't care for (Trump, Facebook, identity theft, robo calls), but I'm grateful as hell for modern medicine, even while realizing that a hundred years from now our modern medicine will look primitive.

One is sent home with an eye patch, although I was disappointed to find it's a clear plastic patch held to the face with soft tape instead of a jaunty black one with a strap.  So there went my yo ho ho jokes.  My eyeball was a little achy, but not as bad as I had anticipated.  The patch is worn for the entire day post-op and then at night for a week.  I didn't find it troublesome nor even distracting in bed, which surprised me.

Some of the post-op restrictions are that one mustn't exercise nor bend over for a while.  I can manage not to exercise, except for walking (and thank goodness that's still allowed or I would have gone crazy already), but it's really difficult to go through a day without bending over.  Taking the laundry out of the washing machine, for example, or putting the cat bowl on the floor, or putting on shoes, or etc. etc. etc.  Still, it's important to mind the medical advice so as not to shift the new lens.

One of the biggest difficulties after c.s. is that one eye now has better vision, but the other doesn't.  What to do about that little puzzle?  I have (soon to be had!) presbyopia, which means I don't (didn't!) have clear vision at any distance, so I wore my trifocals all the time, with another pair specifically lensed for looking at my computer.  I tried first taking a lens out of the trifocals on the amended side, but that didn't work at all, gave me terrible double vision.  I figured I was just going to have to be purblind for two weeks, until the other eye is given its new lens.  However, I gradually came to see (hahaha!) that I can already see fairly clearly out of the new eye.  Full clarity of vision is not possible because of the unamended eye, but I already anticipate that after that one is repaired, I may not have to wear glasses at all.  Right now I've settled on going without glasses most of the time and using my computer glasses for reading and the computer.  It's rather annoying to have to put them on and take them off and put them on and take them off all day (if this isn't a first world problem, I don't know what is).  It's still too soon to know if I'll need glasses at all once the second eye has its new lens, but if I do, they will probably be just for reading, or will be a much, much lighter prescription.

All in all, in spite of a few days of mild achiness in the eye, the demanding schedule of eyedrops, and not great vision for a while, not to mention the fact that I'm not one of the women who take off their glasses and suddenly become beautiful, the surgery was absolutely and without question worth it, and feels like a new chapter of seeing the world.  Oh, and something else has happened that feels like a new chapter, but I can't remember what it is.