Cataract Surgery Has Given Me My Life Back

Here’s what it’s like to get this medical procedure, and how it can change your outlook

Ann Brenoff,

AARP

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Published January 07, 2026

a field of flowers in the shape of two eyes, on a black and cloudy background

Monica Garwood

Welcome to Ethels Tell All, where the writers behind The Ethel newsletter share their personal stories related to the joys and challenges of aging. Come back Wednesday each week for the latest piece, exclusively on AARP Members Edition.

I began wearing drugstore reading glasses right around my 50th birthday. Somewhere around 60, I graduated to prescription readers, which brought clarity to my eyesight and greater access to cuter frames. Shallow me even had glasses made to match certain outfits. My glasses became a fashion accessory and worked pretty well for my ever-diminishing vision, too.

But when I crossed the threshold into my 70s, it was game over. “Bifocals?” I repeated what the nice optometrist had just said, adding, “You’re kidding me, right?” No, he wasn’t. And so I graduated to thick-as-Coke-bottle glasses.

For years I tried progressive lenses, transitional lenses and progressive/transitional lenses that helped my indoor and outdoor vision. Except for when they didn’t. If I looked down at my feet while walking the dog, the curb appeared closer, and I often stumbled stepping off. If I were out in the bright sun and came indoors, my dark lenses remained too dark for me to see.

I started making accommodations for my increasingly poor vision. I stopped skiing when I could no longer differentiate between moguls and flats through glasses that always fogged up under my goggles.

A lifelong reader, I stopped buying books because the type was too small, and instead got a Kindle so I could enlarge the text. I came to use my phone’s flashlight to read the menus in dimly lit, romantic restaurants. And bless the child who showed me how to enlarge the type on my laptop, thus thwarting any discussions of having to end my career as a writer.

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However, my true moment of reckoning arrived when I neared 75 and the state where I live required me to take a vision test to renew my driver’s license. I had already stopped driving at night because oncoming headlights blinded me, and the fast traveling speeds on our freeways left me a nervous wreck. I barely passed the DMV’s vision test, squinting and guessing my way through the lines of letters, each one growing blurrier.

Shaken by the reality that I really couldn’t see well enough to drive, I voluntarily took myself off the roads. I gave my car to my adult son and relied on my husband, friends, ride-share and my feet to take me where I needed to go, which was not ideal. Nobody wants to have their wings clipped.

And so I wound up in an ophthalmologist’s office and was scheduled for cataract surgery in both eyes. Cataracts are those cloudy spots on the lenses of the eye that can impair vision. The surgery removes the cloudy lens and replaces it with a clear, artificial one.

It is one of the most common surgical procedures performed in the United States each year, with approximately 3 million to 4 million procedures annually, and it has a near-perfect success rate. Medicare Part B will pay for cataract surgery if it is deemed medically necessary and you choose to get the standard monofocal lens implant. (It will also cover a pair of glasses or contacts after surgery.) Fancier intraocular lens implants (IOLs), which are not covered by Medicare but also eliminate the need for glasses or contacts, are also available.

In my case, being both near- and farsighted, I opted for the basic monofocal lens. In practical terms, it means I can now see clearly without glasses at medium and long distances. I can drive, sit in any seat in a movie theater, walk the dog and even read the closed captions on the TV from my couch. For close-up reading, I am back to my over-the-counter reading glasses, this time in a mere 1.5 strength instead of the 4.5 I once needed.

The procedures are most often performed in a hospital setting or an ambulatory surgery center and are painless, quick and easy to recover from. I was given a light anesthesia via IV that put me in a twilight-sleepy state for the 15-minute procedure. I wore an eye patch for about 24 hours until the doctor removed it in his office and gave me a pair of wraparound plastic sunglasses to wear for a few days until my sensitivity to bright light diminished. In the weeks post-surgery, I had to use anti-inflammatories and antibiotic eye drops daily.

A small incision was made in my eye, breaking up the cloudy cataract with ultrasound, and the doctor removed those pieces. With many thanks to the anesthesiologist who made sure I was comfortable, I watched a spectacular light show going on in my eye, and would later proclaim it was the best fireworks I’d ever seen.

For the second eye, I was in a deeper sleep and didn’t see or remember a thing. I give even more thanks for that.

The surgeries are performed one eye at a time, with two to four weeks in between, allowing the first eye to fully heal. But l literally began to see anew as soon as the eye patch came off.

Colors were brighter and crisper. I looked in my garden and saw all the new flower buds. I could read a hardcover book. And, within days of my second surgery, I was back behind the wheel, driving myself places and once again tasting independence.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.

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Ann Brenoff is a prize-winning writer and journalist who spent most of her career at the Los Angeles Times before joining HuffPost as a senior writer/editor and staff columnist. She now writes for AARP and other national publications and is the author of CAREGIVERS ARE MAD AS HELL!: Rants from the Wife of the Very Sick Man in Room 5029.