Category: Personal

Second sight

“The colors came back,” a friend said. He was talking about the change after he had cataract surgery. My clinician, a retired surgeon, said something similar, that patients come in and exclaim: “I can’t believe how blue the sky is!”

I didn’t have that.

Cataracts develop slowly, so many don’t perceive how bad their vision has become. I knew. Because: my cataracts made it progressively harder for opticians to fully correct my myopia, an effect I first noticed in early 2018. For the next five or six years, my prescription notched up, and I’d be able to see reasonably clearly for about six months after getting new glasses. The next six months I’d curse the lack of clarity. Repeat until late 2023, when they said I was “ready” for surgery. At that point, I was about 20/40 with glasses.

I delayed for a while, and then had my right eye done in March. The right eye is due in a couple of weeks. So I’ve had four months to explore the difference.

It has been fascinating. And very different from John Berger‘s account, or James Thurber’s fuzzy few days without glasses in The Admiral on the Wheel.

I told the clinician I thought that even if I hadn’t been *seeing* colors exactly right I was interpreting them correctly. That turns out to be mostly true. The sky looks blue, or blue enough, and greens, reds, and yellows render fairly accurately.

This makes sense. The clinician says they generally believe that cataracts block blue light. “Isn’t it just a yellow cast over everything?” a friend asked. Not really.

To review: the primary colors of light are red, blue, and green. Red and blue make magenta; blue and green make cyan; green and red make yellow. Color printers print all colors using those three mixed colors, plus black: CMYK. It’s the difference between additive and subtractive color mixing – that is, starting with black (no color) and adding light, versus starting with white (all colors) and subtracting it. This seems weird at first encounter because schools teach the primary colors of mixing paints, which, as an increasing number of people are pointing out, is all wrong for the digital era.

In real life, my biggest cataract-related color shift turns bright purple flowers a dead greyish pink. A friend’s bright lavender walls grey down. Given that the remaining cataract has continued to densify, my original assessment holds up: I wasn’t losing much color information. I knew my friend’s walls were lavender without being told.

The biggest difference for me is that opticians can fully correct my eyesight again. So the operation has made the world brighter, whiter, and brought back crisp focus. At a recent conference, I could sit in the back and read the slides for the first time in probably five years. Although: blue highlights on the metal chair frames from overhead spotlights disappeared when I closed my post-op eye. Fun!

But then I watched an episode of the TV show Hacks in which Jean Smart wears a bright gold and black dress (above). When I closed my right eye, it turned….salmon. My real-life sweater of nearly the identical color *does not do this*. It is clearly an artifact of cataract plus screen.

Using an RGB color generator, I can say my right eye sees the dress as close to 255-220-0. My left eye sees it as roughly 255-220-150. Bright orange (~255-153-51) on my laptop screen also notably shifts, to a medium hot pink (~255-153-150 ). This suggests my cataract shifts green. Why?

Most other things look close to the same. Among the few exceptions: on an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David’s dark olive shirt looks grey with the pre-op eye, and Cheryl Hines’s pale yellow shirt turns almost white. Does this mean that eye is seeing more blue?

Fluorescent lighting also produces interesting artifacts: a bright lime green poster seen through the cataract seemed aqua.

There’s obviously a logical explanation for this; I just can’t quite work it out. Someone who understands the composition of these lighting conditions could doubtless easily explain what’s going on there (and I hope someone will!).

One final story. A couple of years ago, I saw a particularly stunning sunset out my loft window. Went to get the phone, and snapped a shot. I got back a pale, washed-out nothingburger. Went and got the better, more controllable, digital camera and tried again. Still washed out. Well, damn modern cameras and their autocorrection to what they think you should have seen. I knew about this, because in 2020, when Californians tried to take pictures of their wildfire-caused orange sky, they got grey. Bah.

Cut to April 2025. Same window. My left eye sees a really intense pink and orange sunset. My right eye…sees a washed-out nothingburger. *It wasn’t the camera.*

So, by next month I will have a fully sharp, crisp, bright world on both sides instead of a slightly dim fuzzball on one side. I will feel better balanced, and be better able to play tennis and bike. And I won’t go blind. But there’s a price. Because my post-op eye can’t do close-up the same way, I will grieve the loss of the superpower of being able to read the tiniest print unaided for the rest of my life. And I’ll lose the good sunsets.

Illustrations: Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), in Hacks (S03e01, “Just for Laughs”).

Addendum: With the pre-operative (left) eye, the purple and pink-ish flowers in this photo look the same color. The orangey flowers are slightly pinker, so *nearly* but noticeably not, the same color.

Three groups of flowers: purple, purplish pink, and orange-pink (salmon).
My pre-operative eye sees all these flowers as about the same color. The orangey ones are most noticeably different, but still closer to pink than they really are.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Dorothy Parker was wrong

Goldie Hawn squinted into the lights. “I can’t read that,” she said to her co-presenter. “Cataracts.”

It was the 2025 Academy Awards. She was wearing a pale gold gown, and her hair and makeup did their best to evoke the look she’s had ever since she became a star in the 1960s. She is, in fact, 79. But Hollywood 79. Except for the cataracts. I know people who cheered when she said that bit of honesty about her own aging.

Doubtless soon Hawn will join the probably hundreds of millions who’ve had cataract surgery, and at her next awards outing she’ll be able to read the Teleprompter just fine. Because, let’s face it, although the idea of the surgery is scary and although the tabloids painted Hawn’s “condition” as “tragic”, if you’re going to have something wrong with you at 79, cataracts are the least worst. They’re not life-threatening. There’s a good, thoroughly tested treatment that takes less than half an hour. Recovery is short (a few weeks). Side effects, immediate or ongoing, are rare and generally correctable. Treatment vastly improves your quality of life and keeps you independent. Even delaying treatment is largely benign: the cataract may harden and become more complicated to remove, but doesn’t do permanent damage.

Just don’t see the 1929 short experimental film Un Chien Andalou when you’re 18. That famous opening scene with the razor and the eyeball squicks out *everybody*. Thank you, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.

I have cataracts. But: I also have a superpower. Like lots of people with extreme myopia, even at 71 I can read the smallest paragraph on the Jaeger eye test in medium-low lighting conditions. I have to hold it four and a half inches from my face, but close-up has always been the only truly reliable part of my vision.

Eye doctors have a clear, shared understanding of what constitutes normal vision, which involves not needing glasses to see at a distance and needing reading glasses around the time you turn 40. So when it comes time for cataract surgery they see it as an opportunity to give you the vision that normal people have.

In the entertainment world, this attitude was neatly summed up in 1926 by the famed acerbic wisecrack and New Yorker writer Dorothy Parker: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.” It’s nonsense. Women who wear glasses know it’s nonsense. There was even a movie – How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) – which tackled this silliness by having Marilyn Monroe’s Pola wander around bumping into walls and getting onto wrong planes until she meets Freddie (David Wayne), who tells her to put her glasses on and that he thinks she looks better wearing them. Of course she does. Restoring the ability to see in focus removes the blank cluelessness from her face.

“They should put on your tombstone ‘She loved myopia’,” joked the technician drawing up a specification for the lens they were going to implant. We all laughed. But it’s incorrect, since what I love is not myopia but the intimate feeling of knowing I can read absolutely anything in most lighting conditions.

But kudos: whatever their preferences, they are doing their best to accommodate mine – all credit to the NHS and Moorfields. The first eye has healed quickly, and while the full outcome is still uncertain (it’s too soon) the results look promising.

So, some pointers, culled by asking widely what people wished they’d known beforehand or asked their surgeon.

– Get a diving mask or swimming goggles to wear in the shower because for the first couple of weeks they don’t want all that water (or soap) to get in your eye. (This was the best tip I got, from my local postmaster.)

– A microwaveable heated mask, which I didn’t try, might help if you’re in discomfort (but ask your doctor).

– Plan to feel frustrated for the first week because your body feels fine but you aren’t supposed to do anything strenuous that might raise the pressure in your eye and disrupt its healing. Don’t do sports, don’t lift weights, don’t power walk, don’t bend over with your eyes below your waist, and avoid cooking or anything else that might irritate your eyes and tempt you to scratch or apply pressure. The bright side: you can squat to reach things. And you can walk gently.

– When you ask people what they wish they’d known, many will say “How easy it was” and “I wish I’d done it years earlier”. In your panicked pre-surgery state, this is not helpful. It is true that the operation didn’t hurt (surgeons are attentive to this, because they don’t want you to twitch). It is true that the lights shining on your eye block sight of what they’re doing. I saw a lot of magenta and blue lights. I heard machine sounds, which my surgeon kindly explained as part of fulfilling my request to talk me through it. Some liquid dripped into my hair.

– Take the time you need to prepare, because there’s no undo button.

Think of it as a very scary dental appointment.

Illustrations: Pola (Marilyn Monroe) finding out that glasses can be an asset in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.