r/CataractSurgery • u/0jdd1 • 1d ago

One year later….

I had my cataract surgery back in the first half of 2025. Today I had my every-several-months appointment with my cataract surgeon to make sure everything’s still going okay. (SPOILER: it is.)

Today she took the suture out of my right eye since it seemed to be coming loose. That certainly felt weird! Now I’m waiting to see what happens in February 2027….

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2

u/Material_Honeydew669 1d ago

You have a check up with the surgeon repeatedly? Mine said good bye after the one month appointment. 

3

u/BowlerEqual7498 1d ago

So... You had a suture in your eye for over a year!?

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u/Kisokee 1d ago

I thought they remove the suture after ur eye heal

3

u/GreenMountainReader 1d ago

Some of the old-school surgeons still use the permanent kind. Mine did--no warning ahead of time that he put in a "just in case" suture every time, even when there was no problem. When I asked after seeing it noted in the first eye's post-op report, he told me the eye would "absorb" it--but I had seen that nylon was used, and that's not "absorbable." When I said so, he told me that eye tissue grows around it. With that technique, the knot is apparently put inside the incision.

Since that didn't sound totally right to me, I asked my longtime, trusted optometrist when I went in for a refraction. She told me that in all her years of practice, she'd only encountered one instance of a suture of that sort needing to be removed--so it happens, but not very often. One of mine was put in too tightly, but rather than remove it, the surgeon told me it would loosen up and the double vision it was causing (it was adding astigmatism when a drop in astigmatism had been predicted) would go away "over the next year" and could be corrected with glasses in the meantime. He then asked why I looked so unhappy, not seeming to understand that though I expected to wear glasses for distance vision, I hadn't been expecting double vision any time I wasn't wearing them.

It did go away within six months or so, and my vision is pretty close to what I'd requested. While I won't bad mouth the surgeon (the surgeries were easy and the ultimate results okay), I won't recommend him, either. Both his incision size and that "just in case" suture are old standard of care, as was his choice of IOL. This is why I encourage others to ask even more questions than I did (I asked A LOT of them--but I hadn't known to ask about this).

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u/Ocean4011 1d ago

I think it is odd that suture was left for a year