cataract glasses

Thank you for your kind response. Unfortunately, bring bedridden and allergic to painkillers makes the options mentioned virtually impossible. I thought I'd heard of comparable glasses being made that are lighter weight and somewhat thinner. Incidentally, she does have soft contacts. It's untrained fingers in the eye that are the problem now. She used to becabkevto take them out with no trouble. Thank you anyway for your much appreciated help!

I'd suggest seaching for "high index lenses", if I try to put a link in they send the post off to a moderator so it may take time to appear.

  Lens implant surgery is far different than it was decades ago, though it may not be viable or productive  given her condition, or depending on the level of care needed (since there would be eye drops afterwards for a few weeks). It really isn't very involved or traumatic. It is a few minute operation with a local anesthetic (there is likely something that she isn't allergic to they could use) and often only steroid drops afterwards without any sort of painkiller needed. Some use topical NSAID drops instead of steroids, but if she were allergic I assume they would stick to steroids (though there are multiple NSAIDS to choose from so it may not be an issue). 

Btw, I didn't mean to put a smily face in the first post  typed a ":" before a ")" by accident (habit of my fingers perhaps).

Thanks, again, and no worries about the smiley face.  I need any and all smiley faces, in fact.  I just feel like there's something I'm not doing to help her.  I do think she would not want to have any kind of surgery, especially since she's not computer savvy, and I'd hate to advise her to do it if by some weird chance she had poor results.  With her medical luck, that might be the case, too.  But again, thanks for your good suggestions!!

I would hunt then for high index lenses, last I heard Zeiss made the highest index lenses but I'm not sure if they are available in the US. As I said, last I checked the highest index lenses were glass, which some folks in the US don't like, but it seems a person confined to a bed is at low risk of having their glasses broken or something so it seems worth considering.

It makes sense in her condition that it may be best not to add the hassle of even minor surgery if it can be avoided, it just came to mind that an artist might appreciate having what would likely be good vision, even if confined to a bed. However as you say there is the risk something can go wrong, and she may very well have bad memories from the sort of traumatic experience cataract surgery would have been like decades ago.  Also at her age it is posssible she has other eye issues that would be counter indications and make it not worth her while, though it might be worth asking her opthalmologist since I think usually its an option.

Surgery is vastly different now than when she had it (I had mine done in December, at the too early age of 52),  the overwhelming vast majority, almost all, get good results, it is the most common and safe procedure out there, and lens implant surgery is essentially the same thing. Although in her case it might be slightly more complicated than the typical surgery, likely not much. Usually these days they try to implant the new lens into the lens capsule where the natural lens was, but I'm suspecting since she didn't get an implant years ago that instead they would place the implant outside of the lens capsule and suture/glue it (which is still a fairly common procedure since sometimes the lens capsule tears these days and they need to implant the lens outside the capsule).