How do you know if you have cataracts? It’s a gradual process as is the rest of the joyous ageing process. It creeps up on us with small changes that you can accept day by day.

It’s a little bit like watching grass grow. You’re not quite sure it’s happening and when you come back a week later, you find things have changed. The most common situation that patients find themselves in is the quality of vision starts to decline.

The most extreme situation for any of us for our visual function is driving in evenings or driving at night time. We did not evolve to move around at high speeds with dark-adapted large pupils and shards of bright light coming at us. None of us likes driving at night but when you start to develop cataracts the lens inside your eye is splitting these points of light that are coming at you, and because your pupils are larger, more of the lens is open to this light, and so you start to notice increasing difficulty with night driving.

Sometimes patients will just start to shrink their life. They may not even have consciously thought about the fact that the quality of their vision is making them limit their activities. But they will have started to avoid driving at night time because they just said they don’t like it or they’re uncomfortable about it.

What can then start to happen is they can start to limit other activities. They might start losing their golf ball and worried about asking their friends to keep tracking their ball every time they tee off and so they drop out and say I don’t enjoy playing golf anymore. It can be a gradual process of declining quality of vision, increasing frustration with activities that are either required or previously enjoyed by the patient and so eventually they reach a point they say: “Enough’s enough! I need to get something done about this.”

Most people are seeing an optometrist who can work with the patient and advise them have reached the point where they can no longer help with improved spectacles. At that point, the real help is with cataract surgery.

It is a beautiful operation, where we can remove this lens that is impaired and no longer refracting the light cleanly and crisply for the patient. We can replace that with a nice, clean, optically clear acrylic lens and restore that function, restore that clarity of vision and get people back to enjoying the things they want to do.  Whether it’s getting back to playing golf, playing bridge, going out for dinner with their friends or just seeing what they need to see.