The numbers I remember here were that the basic lenses themselves cost well north of £400 each and my fancier ones cost £900-odd each. But my NHS trust will only pay for the basic ones and (the real stinger) if you choose a fancier lens they not only make you pay the extra lens cost but they also make you pay for absolutely everything else - the pre-op, the surgery and the follow-up - even though those costs are the same whichever lens the surgeon puts in. It seems purely to be a way of the trust shirking their responsibility. For what it’s worth my total cost for each eye was a little more than £3k (the procedural costs were about £2200 per eye).
Oh, that’s a kicker, I shouldn’t really be surprised.
Thanks Graeme
I paid £8k for a pair of the fanciest multi-focal lenses, but if I knew then what I know now, I probably would have chosen to go with the freeby NHS distance lenses with glasses for intermediate and near.
Two months after the ops (both on the same day) my eyes have recovered very well, dry eye (a very common after effect of IOL surgery) has mostly gone and my vision is probably as good as it’s going to get.
I would score my distance vision 10/10, intermediate 7/10 and near 8/10, but this is very much light dependent. The downside of the multi-focals is they greatly reduce contrast. In good light, (daytime) I can read quite small print but in twilight or at night, nope. Fortunately, most of my reading is done on a backlit screen, so it’s not too much of an issue.
Bottom line is that even the fanciest IOL lens will not give perfect focus in the near field, like varifocal or reading glasses.
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I might have done the same. But honestly I don’t know. As I say, my mate reckons his NHS free ones let him see his car dashboard well enough to read the sat nav details. But how well they work depends on the shape of your eye (you’re effectively born with that) and the state of your retinas. My 50 years of diabetes have compromised my retinas a bit so I wanted to give them all the help I could.
The critical things of course are a) that I was really only going to get one go at this - I couldn’t upgrade if I thought the NHS lenses weren’t quite cutting it and b) there was no way of knowing in advance how it would turn out. I had the money and these were my eyes. I’m very pleased with the outcome and I’ll settle for that.
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I can’t really read books unless in perfect light - no chance in bed without installing some huge spotlights. The Kindle is fine, but now friends can’t lend me books. It’s an unexpected downside of age!