Cataract Surgery - after
Just got back from the Cataract Surgery (it was about two hours away in Bellevue, WA)
We were there for about three hours although most of that was waiting for eye drops to take effect. The procedure itself took less than ten minutes and was totally painless. The worst part was when I had some Novocain injected into my eyelids and that was weird but not painful.
Here is the patient before me --
some chap named Alex.
They said that the anesthetic would wear off in about four hours and sure enough, I could start to move my eyelids when we were a few minutes from home. Came home, took the bandage off and I can now resolve blades of grass...
One side effect is that the anesthetic used also affects the optic nerve so the visuals and color balance is very strange right now. During the surgery it was downright bizarre -- very LSD-like. My field of vision was a diffuse white light and I could see movement but only the edges of things and then, they were strobing. Colors are still a bit wonky and I can see the flicker of my monitor with the new eyeball and not the left. See what the next couple days bring...
Here I am doped to the gills, wired for sound and ready for the knife:
Click for full-size Image
They gave me a video of the procedure which I'll post when I get it digitized. Very cool stuff actually...
UPDATE: The people who did the work deserve a big fat plug:
Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute I am not an opthalmic surgeon but it is possible to recognize professionalism in a field not your own.
The 'sureness of touch' when people are operating instruments, the item-by-item procedure that is followed and the fact that a second person checks each item as a followup, the complete transparency of the business -- no question was unanswered and nobody had to get info from another source (I am interested in optics and scientific instrumentation so I was asking some pretty obscure questions -- the people operating the equipment had an actual understanding of what they were doing, they were not just following some list on a piece of paper).
If you live in the Pacific Northwest and have cataracts or need refractive surgery, give these people a call -- I cannot recommend them highly enough.
Posted by DaveH at April 14, 2005 7:52 PM
