Cataract Surgery Recovery and Results
If you’re considering cataract surgery but are worried about the procedure or the length of recovery, you can rest assured. After cataract surgery, our patients recover quickly and report little pain. In fact, many don’t even find that they need any rest period following surgery.
Is cataract surgery safe and how long is the recovery?
Surgeons at Mackool Eye Surgery have developed advanced instrumentation and methods that have greatly increased the safety and decreased the pain of cataract surgery. With these types of advanced instrumentation and methods, the vast majority of our patients are able to have their cataracts removed in a brief and painless operation, and over 99% require no stitches. Healing is extremely rapid, and patients are able to return to normal activity immediately. Injections and even bandages are no longer necessary for more than 99% of patients. Most patients have improved vision within 10 minutes after surgery.
Will you still have to wear glasses after surgery?
The human lens loses its ability to focus or change shape as we get older. Similarly, an artificial lens implant has no ability to change shape. Therefore, most implants provide clear vision only at a distance. For this reason, normal types of eyeglasses are often worn after surgery in order to correct astigmatism or to improve vision for reading or driving.
That being said, at Mackool Eye Surgery we often use a special implant to reduce or eliminate astigmatism at the same time that cataract and implant surgery are performed. This can result in better vision without glasses following surgery.
After surgery, vision without glasses is often better than it was with glasses before surgery. And of course, when glasses are worn after cataract surgery, vision is almost always better than the vision before cataract surgery. In fact, more than 99% of the tens of thousands of cataract operations we have performed have successfully restored all of the vision that had been lost due to the cataract.