doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Cateract surgery : what replacement lens to choose

My wife has cataracts and has been putting off getting surgery for some time now. She's afraid of facing a painful surgery and recovery, this fear probably goes back to a radial karatotomy(sp) she had done 24 years ago. Can someone here give me an insite into the surgery, is it done under partial or total anesthesia? What is the recovery period like? Maybe I can get her to have it done if some of her fears can be put to rest.
Why do we get cataracts? I noticed several people here were quite young, I thought this was something we faced in our later years. I ask because here I am at 60 with blue (light sensitive) eyes and no cataracts (I had a recent eye exam). Believe me, I'm certainly not complaining, it just seems that if anyone would get them it would be me.
Steve

cataract surgery is light years ahead of 24 years ago. Your wife should not be afraid of painful surgery or long recovery. Both relatively easy. Done with lasers now and almost noninvasive. Disucssion with her Doctor should assuage the fear.

One of the causes of cataracts is exposure to uv light. Sure there are others including genetics.

Thanks guye. I'll be talking to the Dr. tomorrow and get swome more info. You've been very helpful.

My experience with the first cateract surgery was very pleasant. the surgery was done under a local anesthetic (which was induced while I was under a very brief generalanesthesia)and took about 45 minutes. The actual surgery was done under the local. No lasers were involved. The only discomfort was having the nurse stick an IV line in my hand before surgery. I wore a patch over the operated eye for 24 hrs and then nothing. My vision was improved enormously. This was exactly a week ago and the vision continues to improve.

I am aware that there are some new lens' that purport to have a bifocal effect. My doctor won't use them: he tells me they are only second generation products and he has had to remove 9 that were installed by other docs.

At the time I had my implants, I was the youngest person to have the surgery done. The opthomologist that did the work wrote it up for some journal. One year later he did the same for a 17 year old girl.
I had allways had sharp pains in my chest from the time I was 6 or seven. My mother had two sets of twins after me, and thought I was faking to get attention. When I had a severe stroke at 51, the testing found two 1/4" long holes in the wall that separates the left and right chambers of my heart. The surgeon that performed the open heart surgert to correct the birth defects, asked me if I had been told why I developed cataracts at such a young age. I told him I had been told it was from multiple concussions from football injuries. His wife is the head of the opthomology department of a major teaching hospital and determined that my cataracts resulted from the damage caused by 50 years of mini heart attacks left undetected.