Cataracts Really Suck

Conventional wisdom tells us we are born with five senses — sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch — which (hopefully) supply us with needed input for the rest of our lives. All have their place to be sure, but I can’t help but think that the most important one may be vision, especially at the beginning.

This isn’t to say that being able to see the world around us is more important than being able to smell it or taste it, but sight is the one we tune into earliest. An infant only minutes out of the womb can already get a foggy vision of what is going on, long before he or she can tune into any of the others and recognize what their senses are telling them with any degree of confidence.

I have thought a lot about vision and visual acuity lately. This has become a very big deal over the past several days because I just had the first of two cataract surgeries last Thursday. I’ve worn glasses or contact lenses since third grade, so compromised vision is nothing new. But it’s been getting so bad so quickly lately, and the degeneration of my vision has been so impossible to fix, that my eye doctor finally threw up his hands (but fortunately not his cookies) and said it was time to get rid of the damn cataracts.

I have no intention in making this an exhaustive discussion of the medical technology, but it’s safe to say that cataract surgery has come a long way in recent years. Feel free to look online for yourself if/when the time comes that you need to have this done to you.

There’s no lack of information available on the Internet to help you gain a better understanding of what is involved, and what your options are. We should also note that with the technology improving so quickly, anything I say now would likely be obsolete by next week anyway.

But a few general observations may still be in order:

For the most part, if you’re old like me the cost of the surgery itself should be fully covered by Medicare. (Thank you, President Trump, for maintaining health support for us old farts. Although you continue to say that you could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and not lose many, if any votes, if you take away healthcare from a sizable portion of your base you may find that your popularity — as reflected in the Lunatic Left Communist polling stats — would sink even lower than it is now. But since anything that doesn’t confirm you are stable genius is fake anyway, who cares?)

In any event, while Medicare may cover the cost of the surgery (which I’m sure is most impressive — I have yet to see the bill), Medicare does not cover the cost of the actual lens itself, unless you get the entry level “monofocal” version which basically just removes the cataract and leaves your eyes as they were before (although it may be possible to improve one of the focal distances: far (distance); intermediate (computers, etc.); or near (reading). This means that if you needed glasses before the surgery, you will mostly still need them after. If you had astigmatism going in, you’ll still have astigmatism coming out. The major difference will be that the cloudiness should be gone.

However, many people — myself included — figure that if you’re gonna go through all the bother of doing this, you may as well get some improvement in your eyes as well. This leads to the “Premium” lenses which are available, thanks to the medical advances of the past decade or two. And these advancements in technology continue apace, driven in large part by the incredible number of us baby boomers who are still above ground and hitting the point where they need this.

At this time, there are four main choices involved with selecting a premium “multifocal” lens, ranging from: the Toric lens, which is designed for patients with astigmatism; the Extended Depth of Field lens (EDOF), designed to provide middle and far vision; a Trifocal lens, which uses a fundamentally different technology and will (theoretically) give you all three distances of vision but with some potentially serious vision effects, especially at night; to the Light Adjustable Lens (LAL) at the top end, which allow you to come in later and fine-tune the lens itself using ultraviolet light. The LAL is designed to give very good intermediate and far vision, although you will probably still need to use reading glasses (a.k.a. “cheaters”) for anything up close.

The doctor doing my surgery recommended the Light Adjustable Lens as the best option for me. (I am choosing to ignore the fact that — as part owner of the surgical center — he has a financial stake in talking me into the most expensive of the lenses.) So, this is the one I settled upon. But at a minimum payment of $25, I can spread out the pain and still be paying this off for the rest of my life. But… with my new and improved vision, I’ll be able to clearly see the monthly check I’ll be writing to the credit card company.)

I have to say that three days and one eye into this process, it’s not a whole lot of fun (and I have little doubt that Susie would agree). The surgery itself was a piece of cake: they gave me some great anesthesia, and Susie is still laughing about when it was all over, I was still saying “hey when is it going to start?”

But that was just the beginning of the process. It’s imperative that until the fine-tuning is done on both eyes, which will be four to six weeks from now, I do not allow either eye to be exposed to any ultraviolet light at all. This means not going outside without special UV protective eyewear, which I also have to wear inside the house. I also have eye guards to wear at night so I don’t accidentally scratch or bump the repaired eye(s) and pop the stitches before their time.

All in all, this is not a whole lotta fun. I’m having real trouble reading or doing anything else. At this point, I’ve got one eye with a new lens, which is gonna take several weeks to settle in, and the other eye, which is basically still the original, lousy vision I already had.

This should change on Tuesday when I have the second eye done — at least then I will have two eyes that are in kinda/sorta the same situation and will be working together as opposed to one which is approximately 20:60 or so, and the other which is approximately 20:600. I haven’t been bumping into walls while I try to maneuver around the house, but it’s nearly impossible to read, work on the computer (thank God — or Microsoft — for dictation mode), or watch television. All I can really do with ease is eat and drink (it’s 5:00 nearly everywhere).

Sadly, neither of these vices are recommended, considering I’m still trying to shed the weight I gained during the Covid fiasco.

Oh well, this too shall pass…

(One final caveat: this post took me three times longer to write than usual, and is likely full of typos and bad grammar — I can’t really see my computer screen very well. Sorry, I’ll hopefully be in better form for the next one.)