As soon as I first arrived at the waiting room, thee staff there started giving me eye drops. I think they were dropping in 5 different kinds of drops and they came around and dropped them in about four or five times a few minutes apart. Not sure what they were all for but at least some of them were intended to dilate my pupil. They worked.
I was then shown into another waiting room where I was sat in a reclining dentists type chair where they took my blood pressure and gave me more drops. I was offered a sedative if I wanted it but I wasn't apprehensive at all and declined the offer. When it was just about time for me to go in for the surgery, the anesthesiologist gave me some xylocaine infused anesthetic drops. I was then led into the operating room and told to lie on a bed/table.
The Surgery
The whole procedure only lasted a few minutes. I chatted with Doctor Mitchell all the way through it asking what he was doing at the moment and finding out a little about the history of cataract surgery. Doctor Mitchell, has been doing cataracts and other eye surgeries since 1980. Talk about experience! I consider myself lucky to have had one of the most preeminent, reputable and experienced eye surgeons in the city of Calgary and I daresay, all of Canada. Dr. Mitchell had no idea how many cataract surgeries he had done in his career (it has to be several if not into the tens of thousands) but during our conversation, Dr. Mitchell did say that he had installed at least 3,000 of the Lentis MPlus IOLs which I was getting and had almost zero complaints of unacceptable results with those lenses. I will be blogging about those lenses and why I chose to go with them over the other types that were available to me in a later post.All I could see during the surgery was two or three bright lights from the Doctor's microscope. They seemed to move around a bit during the procedure; sometimes from side to side and other times in a circular motion. The video below is not of my surgery and does not involve the insertion of the same type of multi-focal IOL that I had implanted but the basic procedure is the same so the video will give you a very good idea of how my cataract was removed and the IOL was inserted in its place.
Post-Surgery
In a few minutes Dr, Mitchell was done his work and said everything had gone quite smoothly. No hitches at all. I then went to another room where I was given a kit bag with a pair of sunglasses and a clear plastic eye shield to cover my operated on eye while I sleep. I was given instructions about using the three types of eye drops I had been prescribed, told not to shower or get water in my eyes for 48 hours and told not to sleep on my right side which was the side that was operated on. I had to chuckle about that last request. Sure, I can make sure I lie down on my back or left side while I'm awake but once I fall asleep all bets are off as to which side I may turn over onto. Fat chance my subconscious sleep/dream-state mind is ever going to remember not to roll over onto my right side!
After leaving the medical building (the old Holy Cross hospital), I had to go down to the Mitchell Eye Centre for some post-operative checks. They gave me an eye test which I didn't do well at because everything was pretty blurry out of my right eye and they checked the pressure on my cornea which they said was good. My eye was also examined through some sort of magnifying scope and I was told everything looked good in there. The IOL was in the right place and everything looked normal.
By the time I arrived at the Mitchell clinic for the check-up, the anesthetic had started to wear off in my eye. I was starting to feel some discomfort there - like my eye had been scratched or a piece of grit was lodged under my eyelid. I was told this was all pretty normal and that the discomfort and the blurry vision might continue for a couple more days.
Here's a video of a cataract surgery that I think was pretty similar to mine in terms of procedure. The type of multi-focal IOL inserted in this video is different than what I had installed. They all go in the same way though.
A Few Hours After the Surgery
Later on that evening, I tried looking around the room I was in through just my right eye. I could see shapes and colours but it was as though everything had been put into very soft focus and most detail had been removed. Here's an image of a room full of objects I pulled off the Internet. Following that is my Photoshopped rendition that more or less shows what I was seeing out of my right (operated on) eye that evening.
Here's kind of what it looked like to me looking out of my operated on eye a few hours after the cataract surgery:
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