I had a Vivity lens implanted in my dominant eye about 3 month ago. My vision is 20/20 a month later. Vivity is what it claimed to be in terms of mid to distant vision. However, I am not too happy with some side effects I saw, specially at night. Here are my issues. I don't know if any of these issues are caused by the lens, my eye or the surgery. 1. When looking at white letters with black backgrounds on TV (such as captions), I see light shadows of the white letters. The brightness of the shadows are very low so that I don't have difficulty making out the words. 2. When looking at bright light sources such as headlights, street lamps or even traffic lights, I see some small chunks of lights around them. In other words, light sources don't look "clean" to me. Looking at distant lights, I see an elongated discontinuous ring around it. 3. It is harder to see things at night comparing with my other eye with contacts. I think it may be the contrast issue that people were talking on this forum. 4. I see a diagonal streak from 2 o'clock to 8 o'clock direction-wise whenever I see strong headlights shining my way. The light streaks also appear on street lights when gets closer, sun light bouncing off cars during the day, bright spots on TV in a dark room and even moon in a dark sky. One of the reason I chose Vivity is the claim of less PD such as glare and halo at night. I must be very unfortunate to still get them which is not all impossible considering my lens power of 12. I was told by my surgeon that even monofocals may still get glares, halos, starbursts and streaks. So I am really uncertain about what to choose for my non-dominant eye. Among all these problems, I feel that the streaks are the most difficult to deal with. It's strange that the streaks disappeared for a period of two weeks starting from my 7-day post-op appointment. But it is now here to stay. I don't know if anybody have experience with getting rid of these streaks. I am now facing the decision of my seconds IOL. I just want to make sure I don't get the same streaks in both eyes which will really amplify this problem.
My theory on the Vivity lens is that it should only be used in one eye with a monofocal in the other eye. This will help make up for the contrast sensitivity loss in the Vivity. In a perfect world it would be best to have the Vivity in the non dominant eye and the distance monofocal in the dominant eye.
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That said I have a distance monofocal in my non dominant eye, and an under correction of about -1.25 D in my dominant eye. So I see distance best with my non dominant eye, and close up with the dominant eye. It is called crossed monovision. It still works, but in an ideal world it probably would be a bit better to go the other way.
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I occasionally see semi circular really quick flashes when there is a light off to my left side when I am in a dark area. I think they are reflections off the sharp square edges of my AcrySof IQ monofocal lens which only occur when my pupil is wide open. So far I have not seen them in my more recent Clareon monofocal.
Maybe ask your surgeon if its something that goes away over time as your brain adjusts. Are you happy with your vision with vivity during the day, is the contrast level during the day OK
Hi Mike - my opinion for what it is worth is that there wont be much improvement as it has been 3 months.i have Symfony lenses implanted in 2017 and I see concentric circles around certain light sources. As I get closer to the lights circles get smaller till they are a bit fuzzy.
You do get used to this in time. but perhaps depending on personality type it may never be acceptable.since you ate 3 months in you could get an exchange for a mono focal lens in one to mitigate the effects in the vivity lens eye. There is an additional risk to exchanges and your doctor is right in that dome people get visual disturbances even with a mono focal lens.
I am happy with my vision with vivity during the day. To tell you the truth, I have never paid attention to contrast during the day. The first couple of weeks, the surgery eye sees things with washed out colors. After that things look good. I did notice some differences in color scheme between the vivity eye and the cataract eye. The difference is like a room with fluorescent light and a room with incandescent light, the vivity lens being the fluorescent room. But none of these issues bothered me like the streaks at night.
My surgeon did suggest a monofocal in the other eye.
I think I will most likely go with the “crossed monovision”. Just like your situation, I think it’s better for my dominant eye to have vivity so I can see computers from 2 feet away. I spend most of my days working on computers. That being said, I don’t mind wearing glasses. If I knew my night vision would be impacted, I would’ve chosen monofocal, albeit a difficult choice. I think I took a gamble because Vivity claimed to have less side effects at night. I guess it didn’t work out entirely as expected.
You could get very good vision at 2 feet with your monofocal eye set to distance. It does vary from person to person, but 2’ is a realistic expectation, with 3 feet at the worst. I can see a computer monitor quite well down to 18" with my distance eye (0.00 D), and down to 12" with my closer vision eye (about -1.25 D).