ripeness isn't all

King Lear may be a play about literal, metaphorical and symbolic loss of vision, yet Edgar wasn't talking about cataracts but about life and death (it's just as well he didn't get on to football). I have often heard that cataracts have to 'ripen' before they can be removed, but that no longer seems to be the case. The leaflet I was given on my last visit to my optometrist made that clear, but whether either of my cataracts, for I have one on each eye, is 'ripe' is unimportant now. What matters is that at a recent hospital visit the consultant ophthalmologist, aware that my sight had rapidly deteriorated recently, to the extent that it caused problems daily, offered me day surgery. I could have had both eyes 'done', but because of the poor vision in my left eye, a result of the 'lazy eye' I was born with, and despite two operations when I was nine and thirteen, I decided to leave the left eye cataract alone, although it is more extensive than the one on the right eye, and have my 'good' eye 'done'. This will happen in August.

Whenever the topic of cataracts comes up - and the frequency increases with age - the standard response is for somebody to trot out an example of successful surgery, either their own or a friend's or relative's, and say how safe, painless and easy it all was, and how everything has been so much better since. And of course it usually is, but not always. My mother was registered partially sighted after (I do not say because of) unsuccessful operations on both eyes. It was hardly reassuring, but at least honest, when a ninety-four-year-old patient at the clinic I attended announced to everybody, without being asked, that 'they' had made a complete mess of her cataract removal years ago.

Before deciding to go ahead with the operation I had been offered, I asked about the success rate and the risks. The consultant told me that there is a 1 in 100 risk that I shall need a further operation and a 1 in 1000 risk that I shall lose all vision in that eye. The latter would affect my life drastically, to the extend that I could no longer read. I would be able to get about, with difficulty, recognising people but severely limited in my daily life. (I had been practising by covering my right eye for short periods when watching television or walking about the house.) Whatever happens will affect both of us, and it was a joint decision, but I thought the risk small enough to take, especially as I shall almost certainly need to have the cataract removed sooner or later, and when I am older and perhaps in poorer health there could be additional problems. There is every chance that before the new football season is a month old I shall be able to read the names and numbers on players' shirts and on the screens at the Emirates, to read without having to shield my right eye from glare, and to manage without having to ask Sue to read scores and captions on television. The tiny but unignorable risk is that I may stumble closer to unlikely empathy with Samson and Milton, despite my lack of resemblance on either count.