Cataract Surgery
procedures and options
Years ago, cataract surgery was a cumbersome procedure for many patients. In fact, for most it required overnight stays in the hospital and a lengthy recovery process to fully restore their vision. Incredibly, when Dr. Koch first began performing cataract surgery patients stayed in the hospital for two weeks! Today, thanks to advanced surgical techniques such as “no stitch, no-patch, no-needle” cataract surgery and convenient outpatient facilities, such as the St. James Surgery Center, your cataract surgery experience will be comfortable and convenient with minimal discomfort and interruption of your daily activities and lifestyle.
Cataracts, Procedures, and Options
What is a cataract?
A cataract is a cloudy lens in your eye.
When you were born your lens was flexible and transparent. The flexibility let you focus from far to near and back again, and the transparency let you see clearly. Every day of your life the lens changed a little bit, first losing its flexibility, and later losing its clarity.
At about age 40 you lost the ability to focus from far to near and back again because your lens lost its flexibility. This condition, called Presbyopia is normal and happens to everybody. It is the first sign of age affecting your lens’s function.
Years later your lens began to lose its transparency. It became cloudy and you developed difficulty seeing through it. That’s when we call your lens a Cataract.
Cataracts begin as a very slight clouding that you might not even notice. Some cataract progress quickly; others develop slowly.
The most common symptoms are:
- A painless blurring of vision
- Glare, or light sensitivity
- Poor night vision
- Double vision in one eye
- Needing brighter light to read
- Fading or yellowing of colors
What causes Cataracts?
The most common type of cataract is age-related. It is a normal consequence of living a normal life. There are other, less common causes of cataracts including:
- Hereditary
- Diabetes
- Injury to the eye
- Medications, especially steroids
- Radiation
- Previous eye surgery
- Other, unknown factors
How is a cataract treated?
When a cataract first begins the symptoms are usually slight, so we advise putting up with them. We may recommend changing your eyeglasses to compensate for changes in the lens’s ability to focus. However, these are temporizing measures, not definitive treatments.
The only way to fix a cataract (your bad lens) is by removing it and replacing it with a new, synthetic lens, called an intraocular lens (IOL). Some IOLs are designed to just restore clarity to your vision; others are designed to restore both clarity and flexibility, improving your vision like it was when you were younger than 40 years old.
Learn more about cataracts and cataract surgery at www.aboutcataractsurgery.com
