Around 18 months ago, cataract surgery changed my life.
Who knew that the lenses installed by a ophthalmic surgeon could not only eliminate the increasingly cloudy view of the world that cataracts cause, but could correct poor vision as well?
According to the Vision Council of America, approximately 75 percent of adults use some sort of vision correction. About 64 percent of them wear eyeglasses, and about 11 percent wear contact lenses, either exclusively, or with glasses.
Some eyeglass wearers can see better than others. Not me. Having discovered that the kid sitting next to me in fourth grade could see the writing on the chalkboard and I couldn't, off I went to an optometrist for the first of many, many pairs of corrective lenses. Along with being nearsighted I also developed astigmatism, in which irregularly shaped corneas prevent light from focusing properly on the retina, blurring vision at any distance.
Being vain and in denial, I often wouldn't wear my pink cat-eye glasses at school, preferring to remember what classmates were wearing to identify them in hallways between classes. They were surreptitiously slipped on when teachers wrote on the board and notes needed to be taken. They came off as soon as the bell rang and we thundered out into the hallways to head to the next class.
Matters improved when I was 16 and got the first of many pairs of hard contact lenses, which corrected both problems. Years later, rigid gas-permeable contacts, more comfortable than hard lenses, entered the equation. They worked fine, but were useless when it came to swimming, running or riding a bike on a windy day (grit gets trapped beneath them), or being able to see clearly across a room first thing in the morning (RGPs aren't designed for overnight use).
And users have to carry around a pair of backup glasses, cleaning solution and a case at all times, in case it's necessary to remove a lens that's irritating the surface of the eye.
What about soft contacts, you ask? Some of them are capable of correcting astigmatism, but I tried them when the cost of RGPs skyrocketed, and they didn't work well for me. When my last pair of RGPs was too scratched to be of use I was resigned to wearing regular glasses if I wanted to see, along with readers for computer work (thanks, presbyopia).
That's about the same time my cataracts--slowly developing cloudy areas in the lenses of your eyes that cause blurry, hazy, dull-colored vision that can make it hard to see at night--were far enough along to warrant repair. More than half of all older Americans get them.
Ophthalmic surgeons won't mess with cataracts until vision loss gets in the way of everyday activities. I was anxious for that day to come (you can get the surgery before then, but it's unlikely that insurance will help cover the cost).
And when the time was right, I was shocked to learn that not only could surgery replace the cloudy lens with an artificial (intraocular) lens, but the artificial lens could be calibrated to correct vision problems such as nearsightednes, farsightedness and astigmatism.
Who knew?
Some IOLs can provide distance vision, near vision, and presbyopia. "You probably won't need glasses after the surgery," I was told. "Can we schedule this tomorrow?" I asked.
Turns out there had been a last-minute cancellation. So we scheduled for the next morning.
I opted for what's known as monovision, a technique where one eye is corrected for clear distance vision, and the other for comfortable near vision. It's not for everybody; your brain has to figure out how to filter out the image from the eye that's not in clear focus.
The first surgery (each eye is done separately, about 10 days apart) took about an hour (not counting a lot of inevitable waiting around in pre-op).
I almost cried when I discovered that, even right after the surgery, I could see out of the distance-focused eye (it got clearer over the next few days). The second surgery was just as successful.
Now I can drive without glasses, go running without glasses, ride my bike without glasses, swim without glasses, watch movies without glasses, work on my iPad without glasses. Along with being lucky enough to marry the right man 26 years ago and share our home with three companionable little dogs, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me.
What flummoxes me is that, despite having anxiously followed practically every vision-enhancing effort over decades (from radial keratotomy, developed in 1974 by Russian ophthalmologist, to Lasik, a laser reshaping of the eye's cornea, to conductive keratoplasty, which uses a tiny probe and low heat radio waves to provide near-vision correction for those who are farsighted), and having written several reported stories about how cataract surgery has advanced greatly over the last 50 years, I didn't know this was possible.
Neither did several friends, some of them in the health news-reporting realm, who were just as shocked--and thrilled--as I was to find out about this. You'd think we would keep up.
Now you know too.
Karen Martin is senior editor of Perspective.
kmartin@arkansasonline.com
Editorial on 01/26/2020