On one fine day in our ophthalmic clinic, a father comes with his twenty-eight-year-old boy holding his hands and slowly making him sit on our chair. He said his boy can’t see clearly since childhood and he is about to lose his current job due to his progressive illness and also his brother, sister and mother had similar issues. Father who is a social worker himself, a sixty-five-year-old fine gentleman, got us thinking about the burden he had to bear considering his whole family is about to become blind with some time.Inside our eye, we have a natural lens. This lens acts like a camera. The lens bends light rays that enter the eye in a manner that the rays fall on the retina and help us see clearly.However, as age increases, the lens loses its transparency and starts to get cloudy. This is the onset of cataract. The earliest eye cataract symptom is increased glare and decrease in night vision. With increase in cataract, your vision will start getting blurred and this affects your routine activities. The proteins in your eye’s lens start to break down around age 40. But you typically won’t notice symptoms until age 60 or later. Certain medical conditions, like diabetes, may cause you to have symptoms sooner.
It is important to get your eyes checked right away to avoid any further complications.If you don’t treat cataract, it may become hyper-mature, a condition which makes it very difficult to remove it or could cause complications during the otherwise-simple surgery.Cataracts can be treated with simple surgery. It’s an outpatient surgery. The success rate of cataract surgery is very high as 95 percent of people who have got the surgery done to say they can see better afterward. Cataract surgery in todays era is no longer about just removal of cataract and putting in lens. With the modern technology, we can plan the cataract surgery using sophisticated diagnostic tools to achieve minimal to no refractive error or power after cataract surgery and to maximize your vision.
Post the cataract surgery, patients could feel itching and mild discomfort, while fluid discharge is also common. However, after a day or two, discomfort should disappear. The problem after surgery is very rare, so your recovery time should be short and uneventful, provided a timely surgery is done.