From the day of the operation, the patient must begin a local treatment which consists of instilling two eye drops. The first is an antibiotic to prevent any infection and the second is an anti-inflammatory. These drops must be instilled a few minutes apart, three times a day, for one to two months.
Please note that most eye drops do not keep for more than 15 days.
It is also customary to keep a protective shell on the operated eye during the first nights.
A follow-up consultation is scheduled the day after the operation, as well as a second one a week later.
Finally, it is only one month after the operation that the doctor will be able to judge the final visual results and prescribe glasses if necessary.
Complications
Like any surgical procedure, cataract surgery can cause complications. There is no zero-risk surgery.
These can appear quickly following a problem that occurred during the operation or appear secondarily without a truly identified cause in the days following the operation.
The most common risks are:
- corneal edema (often disappears quickly)
- Infections (nosocomial or not) sometimes serious require you to follow the pre- and post-operative treatment based on antibiotic eye drops that will be prescribed to you. They often heal without after-effects when taken in time (hence the importance of good post-operative monitoring). These infections appear more readily in certain favorable conditions (diabetic, weakened immune defenses, etc.)
- inflammations,
- the movement of the implant,
- retinal detachment (serious, occurs more often in cases of myopia),
- and hemorrhages.
Post-operative care
Side effects may occur following the procedure. However, they are neither worrying nor a sign of failure during the operation:
- The eye may be red.
- Vision is often still blurry the day after surgery but will improve within a few days.
- You may feel discomfort similar to a foreign body in the eye.
- In rare cases, the patient may feel pain for hours after the operation, which will quickly disappear. A little sensitivity of the eye remains completely normal during healing.
Old glasses can be reused temporarily. If the lens on the operated side interferes with vision, it should be replaced temporarily with a neutral lens at the optician.
The old corrective lens will need to be replaced in a second step, but you generally have to wait 4 weeks for the eye to heal properly before changing the lens.
