Dr Judy Ku outlines how you will feel after having glaucoma surgery and how delighted you will be with your uncompromised vision.
After eye stents anhydrous
I call them, mini stents. They’re the smallest ones or the MIGS. These procedures are relatively painless. You recover very fast. In fact, many people don’t have any symptoms afterwards. They’re often combined with cataract surgery, so you’ll be given very similar drops after the procedure.
After the Xen stent
It’s the next step up. I call that a medium stent. The management for medium stent and your recovery is slightly different. So, it takes slightly longer to recover.
For the first week, your vision will be a little bit blurry to start with, your pressure is expected to be quite low, usually around three to four millimetres of mercury. Over the second week, it gradually increases and that’s when your vision, hopefully, returns more to the baseline level.
During this period of time, it’s important that you avoid any heavy lifting or strenuous activities, as your eye is quite soft.
In the first month, everything still can be quite variable.
After the first month, generally, patients find their vision stabilises.
After conventional surgery, such as trabeculectomy
When it’s a little bit more involved, it’s important that you rest really well for the first few weeks. Your vision will be blurry to start with. Sometimes it can actually be quite high after the procedure, or quite low and your specialists will be there to guide you, as to what to do within the situation.
Sometimes you need to return for some laser treatments to release some of the sutures and your eyes would be numbed and it’s relatively straightforward to do. And it’s very fast. And we can do that in the clinic. Other times you may require to have further anti-inflammatory treatments and your specialists will be able to guide you with that.
After tube surgery
It’s very similar recovery to trabeculectomy. You’ll be expected to rest for the first few weeks. The eye will be a little bit soft to start with. And then the pressure builds up over time. It will be blurry for the first, I’ll say two to four weeks and takes a little while longer for it to stabilise.
We’d like to invite you to book a consultation with us.
It’s the only way that we can really assess the health of your eye and understand your condition and what we may need to do to get your eye health back to where it should be.
We look forward to meeting you so we can talk in person and discuss your condition in detail and get your eye health back on track.
