in next month I,m having a tooth extracted, a cardio version and possibly eye cataract op...all on NHS.
For your own sake Zlatan, please consider carefully the options if the cataract operation is necessary. This is one area where the NHS has long been failing, their methods many years behind the times.
Basically for cost and convenience reasons they will only plan for one eye at a time, and that eye is given a standard focus lens. In other words middling, not particularly good at long distance and hopeless for reading. The lenses are fixed focus of course, unlike the variable focus original that we are born with.
When eventually you need the other eye treated, the same happens and you are stuck with reading glasses since all your closer vision is very limited. If you are very unlucky, like my brother, their cataract treatments will leave you needing glasses for both close and distant vision!
Being aware of this I chose to go private when my cataracts were advancing, meaning my treatment for both eyes could be planned at one time. That enabled me to have a system called Monovision.
That enabled the first treatment of the worst cataract to have a lens biased the way that eye was best, in my case it was the left eye for excellent long vision. Then later when the right eye was treated, the lens was chosen for a shorter vision, still just able to pass the easy UK number plate test but biased for very much shorter range.
The outcome is that I dont need glasses at all and my all round eyesight is actually better than when I was young. The long distance vision is excellent and I can not only read normally but even cope with small print. When tested after both eyes were dealt with I was handed a five section chart of ever smaller print paragraphs and asked to read from the lowest one to see how far up I could go. I didn't bother, just jumped straight to the top paragraph of the tiniest print and read it out at full arms length away.
In any investigation you may discover that replacement variable lenses have been created now. However I was strongly advised to avoid them since the failure rate is high and failure means a repeated operation. A cataract operation has a roughly 1 in 1000 chance of blindness occurring in the eye, and the odds on that happening are greatly shortened for a repeated operation. That's why there are very few doing them.
My operation cost in 2013 and 2014 totalled near to £5000, well worth it for the outcome.
The first eye cost £2200, but because the planning was for two eyes, there was a discount for bulk on the second eye at £1950. There was a charge of £90 for the precise scanning of both eyes to exactly determine their natural focus, plus two long consultations with the specialist consultant at £200 each. These were mainly to determine my exact requirements at each stage.
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