My mother finally made an appointment with the eye doctor to have her cataracts checked. I have had to pester her to get this done. They said a year. Not a year and a half. Seeing as she broke her glasses at Xmas, you’d think she’d have been eager to get some new ones. But no, she dreads the thought of cataract surgery, so she was avoiding the eye doctor for as long as possible, even though her old glasses were so old she could barely see with them.

So she got her cataracts checked, and now I have to pester her to go get a second opinion. As soon as I heard her say the doctor said “Wow! I Can’t believe you can still see through that!” followed by “They aren’t ripe yet. We can put off surgery for a few more years…” I knew she needed to see someone else. “Ripe” is an old term, and what it means is … you have gone completely blind in that eye. It simply doesn’t apply anymore with modern cataract surgery, which is now an outpatient procedure taking about 30 minutes per eye. They now do the surgery when the patient feels their eyesight is being hindered too much, and considering my mom just got new glasses and I had to spend an hour of the phone with her setting up accessibility features on her computer so she could read the screen … and the fact she didn’t see all the letters on the eye test when she got her license renewed (even on the big line), I’d say her eyesight is being hindered. She complains to me all the time about her eyesight sucking and having blind spots, and … she drives a car. These two things do not belong together. So, she’s going to have to go see someone else, and that’s all there is to it. Someone who is perhaps a little more up with the times on eye surgery.

And she can’t argue that she has to put it off because she can’t afford it. It’s covered almost 100% by her Medicare and insurance. Get it done and move on. Do not wait until you have completely lost the vision in one or both eyes first, right? It’s not like I am there to drive her around a year from now when she can’t see at all anymore, and they are still saying they want to wait to do the surgery. It really isn’t their decision, since it’s my mom’s eyesight and quality of life being affected, which any modern eye doctor will tell you. It gets done when the cataract starts causing problems for the patient. Well, Mom has been having problems.

Now to figure out who to take her too. Ugh. I hate doctor shopping.

Thankfully, she is totally unaware of what cataract surgery is, because I swear if she knew, she’d probably rather go blind than go through it. Yes, it’s going to be a somewhat sucky experience, but it’s fast, mostly painless, and she may not even need glasses at all afterward. Now, if I had insurance that would do something like that for me, I’d do it this afternoon! But seriously, she’d freak out if she knew. Reading about it, it does sound horrible, but I have friends who have been through it and say it isn’t anything at all … and the drugs are good. :lol:

Not that you won’t hear me whining about it if I ever have to get it done, because I will whine. I mean … OMG, you’re going to do WHAT to my EYE!!! :eek: