I had an eye doctor’s appointment yesterday at 5pm. I knew needed to bump up the strength in my glasses but this time she really had to to up by quit a lot. Also, my cataracts are growing pretty fast. She said I have a year, perhaps two. The good news is my pressure was great. If I had to choose between cataracts and glaucoma I will take cataracts any day of the week. We ordered new lenses but I kept my frames. These are not that old and I like them. I am rough on frames taking them off and on from sweating at the Y, working in the yard…well doing almost anything because I sweat so much. These have held up very well under those conditions. My eyes were still too dilated last night to try to check my mail or do a post.
Today at work I finished up the two big projects I had going since I am off tomorrow for the long Thanksgiving Holiday. I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving.
Went to my ophthalmologist a few weeks ago. Pressure was up but still within range. He hinted I might be looking at a cataract operation on my right eye in the next few years. I had to get a new lens for the right eye less than a year after the previous lens was prescribed but the vision in that eye still isn’t that great. When I hit 50 the DMR tried to take away my truck and bus drivers licences, but I got a second opinion from an optometrist who cleared me.
Good luck with yours, I’m afraid I might be going to have the same problems my father had, well, at least 10 years later that he did.
Do no hesitate on the cataract surgery. They can also correct your vision at the same time to allow distance or close up without glasses. I opted for distance vision so I can get cheap reading glasses.
The procedure is really quite trivial with the new technologies. No sutures, local anesthesia, takes about 15 minutes.
The results will be remarkable in the improvement in your vision if my procedures are any indication. Well worth it.
Yes, both my folks had cataract surgery. I cannot remember how long ago but they were both in their late 70′s or early 80′s. My eye doctor told me the same thing. That with the new procedure they can correct vision good enough that I may not have to wear glasses. I have at least a year or two before I need the surgery which, hopefully, by then the procedure will be even better.
Dad had his surgeries in his fifties. For a while he had to wear coke-bottle-bottom glasses, then he got hard contact lenses, then some sort of implants. He had both eyes done. After that he didn’t need glasses at all, or only in limited circumstances.
My mum’s eyes are quite good. For as long as I can remember (back to the Sixties) she’s been longsighted and needed glasses for reading, but not distance. Dad and I were the opposite. My eyesight at very close range (less than six inches) is excellent; the only way I can read fine print is to take off my glasses and hold the print close.
I’m a bit afraid of hospitals and any sort of surgical procedures. One of my pals considered some sort of surgery so that he could dispense with glasses, but the surgeon he consulted said that in his particular case it wouldn’t work well and that within a few years he might be back to glasses. But that procedure worked well for the wife of a former boss of mine, so who knows.
I tried soft contact lenses on and off from 1977 to some time in the Nineties, but eventually gave up on them. In the late Seventies I had one split while it was in my eye. (It didn’t split in two, but it did develop some sort of crack, which I couldn’t see with the naked eye, and had to be replaced. It took me about 15 minutes, in considerable pain, before I could even remove that lens from my eye. My optometrist said that contact lenses would never work as well for me as glasses. (Currently I use multifocals, with correction for astigmatism. When I was using contacts I started off with two spherical lenses, then went to one toric/one spherical, then both toric.)
I’ll see my ophthalmologist again in about a year and see what he has to say. I’ve always loathed any kind of surgery but from what’s been said here it might be worth it. My optometrist has said that my vision in the right eye will never be as good as that in the left, and that the lenses he prescribes for me are the best he can do. I’ve been consulting this guy for over 30 years so I’ll take his word for it. If cataract surgery can fix this problem I’d be delighted. I *really* envy people who have normal vision without glasses or contacts.
One of my pals was complaining about her eyesight a few years ago (she’s three years younger than me), she said she was thinking she might have to get glasses. She was driving me somewhere we compared our ability to read road signs. Her vision without glasses was considerably better than my vision with glasses, she could read signs well before I could. I was *so* envious.