Problems after cataract surgery

Although I never had Rk surgery, I too experienced some blurry or fuzzy edges.  It seemed like I could see the periphery of the implants. Some times seemed worse than others, so I was never able to difinitively tell if this condition was improving with time.  I felt like I was still wearing contact lenses - as if I could feel something sitting on the surface of my eyes. It's been about 6 or 7 months since my surgery and the sensation has definitely diminished, athough not completely. Still some times are worse than others  I find using lubricating eye drops helps.

Becky,

I had mono-lenses placed in both eyes.  Each eye had it's own little set of issues afterwards which appear to be clearing.  I had a brief experience with rays of light from the side in one eye but it went away quickly for me.

One eye seems to have dry eye and I'm using an over the counter lubricant for that.  At the moment using Sooth XP.  My left eye experienced higher pressure.  They just took away the drops I was using on it and we will know in another week if stoping Prednisolone fixes the eye pressure issue.  One eye was done about two months ago and the left one was two weeks.  Still doing drops on the left but they took away the Prednisolone because it's a steroid that can tend to push up the eye pressure and my pressure had shot up to 30 at one point.  They squeezed some fluid out through the incession and got it down to 8 but after a recent check it's back up to 26.  Thus they changed the eye drop situation and gave me a drop to help bring pressure down.

Every persons post operative experience in my opinion can be a bit unigue and you may not know how this goes until some time passes.   But as one person on another board pointed out.  IF you have problems that would cause you to want to remove the lens and replace it with some other....you have a very limited time period in which that lens can come out without ruining the natural lens sack it sits in.  Once your bodies lens sack confforms to that lens it's more or less permanent.  Or so I've read. 

In my case I was getting the occasional flare of light if a bright light source caught me from the side or behind at the right angle to my left eye.  Have not noticed it now for a few days so it appears to have cleared or to be clearing and never really happened very often anyway.

Sometimes I think we all tend to forget, catarcts can lead to blindness. I'm presonally willing to live with some minor issues in exchange for not slowly going blind looking through growing cataracts.

Unfortunately, dyphotopsia seems to be under reported, poorly documented, and not adequately researched. As a result, the number of dysphotopsia case estimates vary tremendously

Dysphotopsia is preventable

Dysphotopsia is a preventable side effect of cataract surgery. Dysphotopsia prevention is a simple as having the correct size and type of intraocular lens (IOL).

CATARACT SURGERY

Every year hundreds of thousands of people undergo cataract surgery. Many patients experience difficulties with this surgery. One possible side effect of the surgery is dysphotopsia. A good description of dysphotopsia can be found at Living Healthy 360. One of the more common descriptions of negative dysphotopsia is that patients feel like they are wearing horse blinders. Being a photographer, my description of dysphotopsia is like using a large format camera that has a small format lens on it. The result is vignetting around the edges. Dysphotopsia is described as occurring in two types. Negative dysphotopsia is described as the most common where the edges visible to the patient are dark. Positive dysphotopsia is described as being light or white.

Is the Memory Effect of the Blind Spot Involved in Negative Dysphotopsia after Cataract Surgery

We present novel clinical observations on negative dysphotopsia (ND) in eyes that have undergone cataract surgery. In the past, shadow effects were alleged to be located in the far peripheral temporal visual field 50° to 100° away from the optical axis. In a small series of eight patients we found evidence of photic effects, described by the patients as shadows in the periphery that were objectively located much more centrally. In all cases, we could find an association of these phenomena with the blind spot. We hypothesize that the memory effect of the blind spot which is dislocated and changed in magnification due to replacement of the crystalline lens could be one determinant for pseudophakic ND. The scotoma of the optic nerve head and the main arteries and veins of the phakic eye are displaced in the pseudophakic eye depending on the specific characteristics and position of the intraocular lens within the eye.

My wife had cataract surgery 3 years and 7 months ago. She had RK surgery in the early 80 s and lasik 10 years later. She enjoyed grat eyesight until the dr recommended early removal of cataracts. She has been miserable ever since. She has undergone yag procedures, a vitrectomy in the worst eye along with collagen cross linking on the same eye. She experiences the dark edge or shadow on the bottom outside edge of her eye. She describes it like a tear or blur that you can't wipe away. It results in twinkles, shadows,bluriness and other distractions that have totally deteriorated her quality of life. Thousands of dollars and thousands of travel miles later we just received word yesterday from Emory Eye Clinic in Atlanta that the really don't understand what is causing the incident and dismissed her to go home and learn to live with it. The Dr did say that her case had given him the passion to try and invent something to bring relief. She has 20/20 vision but the issue makes life almost unbearable some days. Her faith in Jesus Christ is the only thing that helps her cope but some days her coping skills give way to distress over living like this the rest of her life. Drs should approach cataract surgery with more caution following RK and consider learning to live with the cataracts. If we could go back we would welcome having cataracts instead of this. People should be warned that their lasik surgery can cause great complications when you enter the stage of life where cataracts begin to develop. I've also learned that cataracts begin to form earlier in lasik patents. God bless all of you who are finding out about this after it is too late to go back. We pray that the Dr at Emory keeps his passion to find a remedy.