Fear of cataract

Thanks for all your comments.I went to a small, local independent optomotrist who was very thorough and helpful and tdid every test possible.i went back to her to ask what she meant and she said her cataract comment was in passing and that she didn't think I would need an operation for 10-15 years which was a relief.It was also quite cheap, not pushy and expecting you to buy ridiculously priced frames. They offered to put my new lense in my old frames but I chose to get a new pair of frames for a change.

Hi

I live in the United Kingdom and I faced the same problem with the same trepidation about two years ago. It did not help that my father had a really terrible experience when he had to have this surgery.

I was born by forceps delivery 58 years ago and the stories my mother told me of the shape my head was after birth leave me in little doubt this contributed to my severe myopia (left 10.75 dioptres, right 6.5 dioptres). Apart from needing glasses like beer bottles (!) everything was fine until about four years ago now my GP prescribed a painkiller for a trapped nerve to which I had the most incredibe adverse reaction. My BP and Blood Sugar rocketed uncontrolled and next thing I knew distant objects started to look fuzzy and I started to see nine moons in an arc where there should only be one. That was the start of the diagnosis of cataracts in both eyes.

Being British and being unfortunate enough to have to suffer the NHS in wales under a Labour administration meant it was almost two years before i rose to the top of the waiting list.

The procedure here takes about twenty minutes but the worst part of it is the hours immediately beforehand, when nurses adminster atropine-like drugs as drops into the eye to open the pupil. You end up seeing an intense glare, and are completely unable to focus. There is no pain, they administered a smal amount of local anaesthetic at the later stages, but this means you MUST NOT rub the eyes !!

When the time came (i was last toibe operate don that day!!) they took me into a room where you lie flat on a trolley and they drop lignocaine into the eye. They took a sort of cotton bud, soaked it in the same lignocaine anaesthetic that the dentists use to numb the gum before injecting the novocaine, and placed it under the eyelid, at the corner of the eye. This is really the worst part of the whole business. Youre lying there with what looks like a twig seeming to stick out of your eye and nose as seen by the other eye !!

After a few minutes to let this work the anaesthetist ran a tiny plastic tube into the side of the eye through the white and that's what they use to administer the rest of the anaesthetic and nerve block. You feel a strange watery sensation and then your eye suddenly feels like lead.... All you see out of it now are blurry outlines, you can't move it.

They take you into the theatre, put this thing like a J cloth over your face so it can get a bit claustrophobic and put an o2 line on your face. The machine will start to trickle water over the face because the eye area must not dry out.

If this is sounding a bit like a waterboarding ... At this point I found the theatre nurse, who asked if I wanted my hand held, quite a reassurance, as you can't see what is happenning in any detail at all.

This machine descends a blaze of light. And then it startes to do the business.

I felt no pain, I felt no pressure. All you need do is hold your head still and as it's in a sort of grooved pillow, this is a doddle.

You see nothing specific, you feel nothing. What each person does see and feel now wil be different. The pressure and the actions of the machine which is going to do the microsurgery triggers sensations in the optic nerve, and the brain fills in the bits. In my case, it seemed as if a tiny clear crystal trapezoidal object descended into my line of view, came up to my eye and SANG TO ME while creating the most amazing, bizarre fractal refractive patterns of white and ice blue. Think Lucy In The Sky with Diamonds meets Close Encounters Of The Third Kind with Special effects provided by Kubrick from the final half hour of 2001 A Space Odyessy. I believe that sort of sensation costs a lot of money when acquired through street drugs ...... ;-)

The machine WILL sing to you. Actuall yit's singing to the suegeon, as he command sit to do various things, it plays tones to him so he knows what it is doing. As I said, think "close encounters". Or maybe not .... !!!!!

And then it was all over. The surgeon made a comment that the lens had been placed very nicely, and I was wheeled out.

I entered the hospital at 12:30, I was walking out with a pirate patch on the eye by 17:15. at 17:30 I was buying effervescent co-codamol in the local Tescos'

The next morning I woke, took off the eye shield and cautiously opened my eye.

For the first time in my life, I could see the time on my digital alarm clock on the other side of the bedroom without grubbing round on the dressing table for my glasses

Two days later I was behind the wheel of my car. I was in a traffic jam on the M5, and the Gordano Valley stretched out for some four to six miles to the west.  A september mist filled the valley with cotton wool. Between what had become a car park, and the coast that must havebeen six miles away, the valley floor was filled with what appeared to be a thousand tons of cotton wool, out of which only the tallest conifers growing in the valey protruded

There were eighty three of them.

I counted every one, all the way to where the hills rose out of the mist six or seven miles away. I could see the top of each in perfect clarity.

I counted every one of them because I could for the first time in my life, and I wanted to wind down the car window and shout "THERE ARE EIGHTY THREE CONIFERS" at the top of my lungs.

I want to take up golf. I want to paint, I want to draw. I want to take a shotgun and blow the hell out of clay pigeons. I want to do anything and everything that a lifetime of having -10.75 myopia inone eye and -6.5 in the other has stopped me from doing.

The "header background image" on my facebook profile page is the last flying Avro Vulcan delta winged nuclear bomber, photographed as she flew over RAF St Athan last year on what was pretty much her final flight.

Some months earlier, I stood in a crowd of 500 people and I was the first to spot her eight and a half miles away at 8,500 feet against cloud cover that perfectly matched her base fuselage colours. The day I took that photo, I was in a crowd of well over 1000 amateur and pro photographers all eager for the first sight of her as she rolled down the Severn Estuary from the Severn Bridge. Once again, I was the first in the crowd to spot her, the grey fuselage against a leaden grey sky no hiding place for the job the surgeons had done on me.

I have to go and have the other eye done. I've just had the pre-op assessment and I am looking forward with eager anticipation to having it done. My mood compared to last time is like chalk and cheese.

But everyone's case is different, and there are risks. After the op, a problem set in. The anaesthetic tube nicked a capillary, fluid started to collect and at one point it looked like the retina might detach.  In November 2014 I found myself not at the Office Christmas Party, but in the emergency eye theatre at Cardiff having an emergency vitrectomy.

But today, here I am, with the vitrectomy a success. I'm sitting in my home office in Newport. looking north over the usk valley. I see the houses across the valley, the bushes the occupants have planted in their gardens, and the trees on the ridge line miles away.

I gave my surgeon, and his nursing staff, hell because I was absolutely terrified of what was going to be done and what might go wrong. There are many things that can go wrong, but amost all of them can be corrected. And in my case I wish I'd had this done decades ago, I've spent my entire life "peering through a glass darkly" thanks to the myopia and the procedure freed me of that.