Dealing With Cataracts During Pregnancy: When Should You Get Surgery?

Pregnancy is an amazing time in your life, but it is also nine months where you have to carefully consider everything you do that is out of the ordinary to your daily routine. You know once your baby is born you are going to have your hands full, so you want to have perfect vision so you can clearly see every new memory that is made. The starting stages of cataracts are interfering with your perfect vision, but when is the best time to have cataract surgery to remove them?

Before Pregnancy

This is the ideal time to have your cataracts removed. At this moment in your life, there are no medical restrictions on what you can be exposed to and the downtime of recovery is not going to interfere with your need to take care of a child.

Removal of cataract eye surgery is so minimally invasive that in many cases patients can be treated as an outpatient and return home the same day, which means there is no need to remain overnight in a hospital. But, there will still be a period of adjustment while your vision returns to full strength, and this can be difficult to focus on when you have a baby to attend to at the same time.

During Pregnancy

Once you know you are pregnant, it is not recommended you have the cataract surgery for two main reasons:

  1. As the pregnancy progresses, your body retains more fluid, and this can lead to swelling of the cornea in the eye. Cataract surgery cannot be performed on swollen corneas.
  2. During pregnancy, it is not unusual for a woman's vision to change, and this may lead to them being more near-sighted than before pregnancy. It is important cataract surgery is done while the vision is in a stable state and not fluctuating.

It is therefore usually ideal to wait until after you have given birth to have the surgery done.

After Pregnancy

The major downside to waiting until after the baby is born to have your surgery is that you may have to wait until you are no longer breastfeeding your child. This is being you will be prescribed pain medication and antibiotics for taking after the surgery is done, as well as steroid eye drops to be used before the procedure. As many new mothers are aware, some medication can enter the milk stream that is being used to nourish your child.

If you have cataracts that need to be dealt with and you are considering pregnancy in your future, then the time to remove them is now. Getting cataracts dealt with before your baby is conceived means you can instead focus all your energies on the life-changing event that lies ahead and that focus will be crystal clear once your cataracts are gone.

About Me

Deanna's Optometry Blog: Tips and Ideas for Kids and Parents

When you first find out that your little one need glasses, you may think a range of things. I know I have been there, as all of my kids wear glasses. Hi, my name is Gina, and I have helped my kids find glasses that wouldn't break when they were little and glasses that looked cool as they got older. I have also dealt with the transition to contact lenses and countless cases of eye infections. If you have questions on optometry for your kids or want to learn something new, take a look through these posts. I hope you enjoy them.