Originally Posted by
Mr Pointy
The treatment for cataracts is to have your natural lens removed & a replacement lens insterted, but I've no idea what "ocular implants" might be. The procedure is often called RLE - Refractive Lens Exchange.
When your lens is removed & replaced you lose the ability to focus on different points - in effect you end up with fixed focus eyes. However, the power of the lens inserted can be selected to correct any existing deficiency so you could indeed end up with the best vison you have ever had, with some provisos. Lenses come in a couple of types:
Monofocal lenses: There are the simplest types of lens which are selected for good vision at a particular distance. They generally have good sharpness & clarity but you will probably need some form of glasses, either for distance or for reading.
You can select which range of correction you want; you can have good distance vision, which will give you fair mid-range vision & require reading glasses. Alternatively you could opt for good near vision which will mean you need glasses for driving for instance. There is a third option which is confusingly called monovison. In this case your dominant eye is set for good distance vision & your other eye is slightly undercorrected so you can read with it. It's not perfect but it's good enough for 95% of the time & means you can read the label on a packet without reaching for reading glasses.
Multifocal lenses: these have tiny Fresnel rings engraved in them & they give a wider range of correction so that you can see both distance & near. Although they sound ideal there are several compromises; they overall resolution/contrast is lower & there is a substantial chance of seeing "halos" around light sources which can be particularly bad when driving at night. Many people get on fine with them, some don't & for me the risk was too great to take. Pilots are banned from having multifocal lenses due to the risk of visual issues.
There is a subset of the Multifocal lens type called a Duet lens. This is literally two implanted lenses, one main monovision lens which corrects for distance vision & a smaller multifocal implanted in front of it. The advantage of this arrangement is that if you don't get on with the multifocal lens it's a fairly simple procedure to remove it, which is what I did.
On the NHS you can only get monovision lenses implanted so if you want multifocals you will need to go private at around £2500-3000 per eye (very roughly).
The procedure is quite straightforward & there's no pain, but it does feel weird having your eye messed about with. You won't be able to drive for a couple of weeks or so until your vision has settled down.
No-one can tell you exactly how your vision will turn out after the operation. They may claim most people will be glasses free but everyone's eyes are different & how you react to the lenses is unique to you. The results are usually very good though: I went from -8.5/-8.0 to -1.00/-0.25
