The Pelican — The Aging Birder (Part 2)

By Linda St-Cyr

Disclaimer – I am not a doctor.  These are just my own experiences.  I am 72 years old.

So, I had my cataract operations! It’s a very large adjustment for me because I have been extremely nearsighted my entire life; the doc even said I was a VERY near-sighted person.  Suddenly, I have clear vision for distances, but can’t see anything up close without reading glasses; quite a reversal, haha.

I’ll start with the most important thing—when I wrote the previous article (linked here), I couldn’t think of a good enough reason to go with multifocal lenses for myself (so I didn’t), but I just discovered that photography might be a good reason to want multifocals. Suppose you see a bird with bare eyes or binoculars, and now you want to get a photo. Unfortunately, photos tend to require that you focus on your phone or viewfinder screen (which is near) as you point your camera towards the suspected location of the bird (which is far). In this scenario, I now need to have my reading glasses on in order to see my phone clearly, but then they must come off to re-find the bird. Very inconvenient, and of course the bird will fly off while I’m fiddling around.

After speaking to one avid photographer with what I would call high-end equipment, she said her camera viewfinder uses far vision, but the values of the camera’s settings would need to be read with near vision, perhaps not a huge problem.

If (unlike extremely nearsighted me) you don’t need a very large correction in the cataract replacement lens, you might still be able to hold your camera at a distance where you can see it clearly enough, and thus you’d be ok with a single-focus lens.  (And I admit I am getting better at guessing what I’m seeing at arms’ length.) This would be something to discuss with the eye doctor. Remember, acknowledged disadvantages of multifocals are the out-of-pocket price and light halos in night vision. The light halos are due to some of the light being diverted to a near focus. For the same reason, multifocals can also affect “clarity of daytime vision” (at least one eye doctor admitted in print), which was of concern to me as a birder.

People have asked me why I can’t simply focus my eyes closer now that I have my IOLs (Intraocular Lenses) replacing my biological lenses. This is because the way we focus our biological lenses is by using our muscles to deform them. But the cataract lens replacement is not flexible like our original biological lenses were. In the future, it may be possible to do focusing of cataract replacement lenses with something called Accommodating IOLs, which are made with more flexible materials, even fluids.

I decided to pay extra to correct the astigmatism in only my dominant eye, which happened to have the worst astigmatism of the two. In an interesting twist, my toric lens (the lens for correcting astigmatism) ended up rotating 71° from the axis it was supposed to stay on. (Only astigmatism corrections seem to require a precise angular alignment.)  Don’t worry, this deviation is NOT a common result; the doctor who saw me afterward said that in 10 years, he’s only seen 6 of us! Nevertheless, it was actually an interesting thing to observe because while it was off the desired axis, I had twice the amount of uncorrected astigmatism that I usually have, i.e., the original amount plus the misaligned correction. It showed me that I truly did have a substantial amount of error in my vision due to astigmatism, so I was glad I had opted to correct it in the dominant eye. 

The other eye didn’t have nearly as much, and it was already giving me vastly better vision than I’d had before the operation, so I was happy with it as-is. So, the eye clinic performed a third operation on me, which consisted of “nudging” (their words) the toric lens back to where it should have stayed. A month later, it’s still in the proper orientation, colors are great, and I can actually glance out the window and identify the birds flying past. Wow!