With Challenging Cataracts, Never Give Up. Cataract Surgery in Los Angeles…
Question: When do you give up on someone’s vision? Answer: You don’t.
Today I did cataract surgery on a very interesting patient. She was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), a genetic disease which causes the retina inside the eye (akin to the ‘film of the camera’) to degenerate. These patients progressively start to lose vision and eventually end up legally blind. These patients also develop other ocular problems such as cataracts.
Our patient was refused cataract surgery by multiple other eye surgeons due to the technical difficulty of the surgery and the limited potential vision due to the RP. She had lost all hope and her cataract had become severe — it was nearly impossible for me to even see inside her eye due to the blockage from the cataract. This delay in her treatment had made a difficult surgery even more challenging.
Using a multi-step approach as well as specially ordered technologies, her surgery was a success. While my routine cataract surgery lasts just 5 minutes, her surgery took nearly 20 minutes — nearly 4 times as long. For the medical readers, she had loose zonules and a dense cataract and required a capsular tension ring as well as a zero spherical aberration intra-ocular lens implant (IOL), phaco chop with phaco power modulations was used to break up the cataract and remove it.
Within the first few minutes after the surgery, she smiled and said that she could already tell that her vision was improved. There’s no way of reversing her RP, but the cataract was completely cured and as a result, she recovered a lot more vision than she had prior to surgery. She’s not able to drive, but she can now do most of her daily activities by herself. This one little surgery has given her a new sense of freedom and independence and has illuminated her world. I was fortunate to be a part of this.
Never give up — there’s always something than can be done. More info at www.maloneyvision.com
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