May
04
2010
I recently had cataract surgery on my left eye and will soon get the right eye done.?
Posted by: in cataract treatment, tags: Cataract, Done, Left, Recently, Right, soon, Surgery
I am not seeing as well as I was led to beleive. it has been about a week and a half, does anyone know if my vision will get better and what is the healing time.
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May 4th, 2010 at 5:47 pm
The goal of cataract surgery is to remove the clouded nucleus of the lens so that light will transmit through the implanted lens without obstruction. The surgeon uses ultrasound to assess the length of your eye and then chooses an intraocular lens power that hopefully will result in not needing glasses to see clearly at distance. If everything goes as is hoped the patient will see clearly at a distance and only need glasses for near. The reality though is that even with the best assessment possible for choosing the appropriate lens power many patients will need some prescription in a pair of glasses to fine tune their distance vision. So even though one hopes to not need a distance prescription following surgery you appear to have had unrealistic expectations as to the assurance of this happening. You are probably going to need a little bit of a distance prescription in a pair of glasses. Hope this helped.
May 4th, 2010 at 6:43 pm
I support Yagman’s answer.
The settled refraction can usually be assessed 4-6 weeks after the operation (optometrists lean more towards the 6 weeks… surgeons tend to be more optimistic but they don’t have to deal with people whose new glasses have “gone wrong” shortly after they’ve got them)
At that point the best vision that the eye can obtain will be established. Usually any blur is just a residual refractive error, but more rarely there are other reasons, such as a reaction at the macula (which can self-resolve) or some capsule opacity, which can be solved easily with a YAG laser.
(This is normally a problem that crops up a little later, if it’s going to. A certain percentage of people need YAG laser up to two years after the operation. *If* required, it’s a very minor procedure with major benefit.)