LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County Animal Care and Control has a new, big group of dogs waiting to be adopted this week.
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of Alaskan husky, American blue heeler, Anatolian shepherd, border collie, Chihuahua, German shepherd, Great Pyrenees, Labrador Retriever, pit bull terrier and Rottweiler.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
Those dogs and the others shown on this page at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption.
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online for information on visiting or adopting.
The shelter is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
Travel nurses take short-term contracts that can require long commutes or temporarily living away from home. Time and again, they have to get used to new co-workers, new protocols and new workplaces.
So why would staff nurses quit their stable jobs to become travel nurses?
Many of the people I interviewed disclosed that they left permanent positions to combat burnout. Although they welcomed the bump in pay, travel nursing also gave them the autonomy to decide when and where to work. That autonomy allowed them to pursue personal and professional interests that were meaningful to them, and it made some of the other hassles, such as long commutes, worth it.
On top of earning more money, travel nursing “gives you an opportunity to explore different areas,” said a nurse I’ll call Cynthia, because research rules require anonymity. “When you actually live there for three months, it gives you a chance to really immerse yourself in the area and really get to know not just the touristy stuff, but really hang out with the locals and really be exposed to that area.”
Other study participants said they enjoyed the novelty and educational opportunities.
“You don’t get bored or stuck in a routine,” Michelle said. “You’re always trying to learn new policies at the new hospital that you’re in, learning about the new doctors, nursing staff, new ways of doing things, where things are located. That helps keep me from feeling burned out so quickly.”
Said Patricia: “I want to see how other operating rooms across the country do things and how they do things differently. I do learn a lot of things going from place to place.”
But nurses with permanent jobs can get aggravated by this arrangement when they learn how much more travel nurses earn for doing the same work, as I found through another research project.
While travel nurses can help hospitals, nursing homes and doctors’ offices meet staffing needs, there are signs that patients don’t always fare as well with their care.
And a Canadian study found that when hospitals let staff nurses work part time and offer other alternative arrangements, their retention rates may rise.
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
The Andromeda Galaxy, M31, looks much different in optical (left) versus ultraviolet wavelengths. UVEX will conduct an all-sky survey to find UV sources, searching in particular for hot binary stars in low-mass galaxies surrounding the Milky Way and for the signatures of exploding stars. Optical: Adam Block/NOAO/AURA/NSF; UV: GALEX/JPL/NASA. BERKELEY, Calif. — An orbiting space telescope approved by NASA last month and scheduled for launch in 2030 will conduct the first all-sky survey of ultraviolet, or UV, sources in the cosmos, providing valuable information on how galaxies and stars evolve, both today and in the distant past.
The $300 million satellite mission, called UVEX or UltraViolet EXplorer, will be managed by the Space Sciences Laboratory, or SSL, at the University of California, Berkeley.
The mission’s principal investigator is Fiona Harrison, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. recipient who is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
The telescope’s all-sky UV survey will complement ongoing or planned surveys by other missions over the next decade, including the optical and infrared Euclid mission led by the European Space Agency with NASA contributions, and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an infrared telescope set to launch by May 2027. Together, these missions will help create a modern, multi-wavelength map of our universe.
“When UVEX launches, for the first time we'll have the entire sky covered from the UV all the way through the infrared,” said Daniel Weisz, one of the science team leaders for the UVEX mission and a UC Berkeley associate professor of astronomy. “Having ultraviolet coverage of the entire sky, which has never really been done before, is groundbreaking.”
UV emissions come from hot objects, but these wavelengths are blocked by Earth's atmosphere and must be studied from space.
The survey will focus on hot, massive blue stars — many of which are thought to be members of binary star systems — as well as exploding stars. In binary star systems, the most massive of the stellar pair often strips material from its companion, which exposes its hot UV-emitting core. UVEX will map the distribution of these “stripped” stars in galaxies around the Milky Way.
The telescope also will carry a UV spectrograph, jointly built by UC Berkeley and Caltech, to record detail about the UV wavelengths emitted by massive stars and during stellar explosions. These observations will provide new details about how stars and galaxies form and how they die.
“One of the things we're going to produce is a chart of the whole pathway from the genesis of these binary stars all the way to what happens when they explode and interact with whatever materials around them that they've lost over time,” he said. “UVEX will just completely change the field.”
UVEX will also be able to quickly point toward newly discovered sources of UV light in the universe. This will enable it to capture the light that follows bursts of gravitational waves caused by merging neutron stars in binary systems, events that are regularly recorded by three large collaborations around the globe, including the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
“A lot of transient events are best seen in the ultraviolet,” said Bill Craig, UVEX project manager. “Having a wide field of view to follow gravitational wave events is a really strong reason for selecting this mission now, so that as LIGO goes through its next campaigns, UVEX will be up there to zero once they see a merger. We then can zip over and see the aftermath of that.”
Low-mass galaxies today and in the early universe
Weisz is particularly interested in low-mass galaxies — those that are about one-tenth the size of the Milky Way.
The most famous of these are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds — satellites of the Milky Way that are one-tenth and one-hundredth the mass of the Milky Way, respectively — but there should be millions of smaller galaxies within our galactic neighborhood. Only about 50,0000 have so far been seen, and few have been studied spectroscopically at UV wavelengths.
“Our sensitivity limits extend to galaxies that are 10,000 times less massive than the Milky Way,” Weisz said. “That's about a million solar masses.”
Such small, but faint, nearby galaxies are hard to identify using optical or infrared telescopes, he said, because they look nearly identical to very distant galaxies whose UV emissions have been redshifted to optical and infrared wavelengths. But if they also emit UV light, they're likely our near neighbors.
“When you see a galaxy that has UV, optical and infrared, it has to be nearby,” Weisz said. “We're trying to map out the structure of these millions of low-mass galaxies across the entire sky in order to better understand how mass, which is mostly made of dark matter, is distributed in the local universe.”
A better understanding of nearby low-mass galaxies will give insight into the nature of many low-mass galaxies now being discovered in the very early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST.
“These nearby low-mass galaxies are pretty small, but also very deficient in metals. Some of them may only have 1% of the metals of the sun or less,” said Weisz. “And it turns out that these very metal-poor, but very active, star-forming galaxies are analogous to what people are finding with JWST at very high redshift.”
Metals, to astronomers, are anything heavier than hydrogen and helium, the primordial material of the universe. A low metal content implies that a galaxy has not had enough cycles of star formation and explosion to seed the galaxy with many of the heavier elements, like carbon, oxygen and iron.
Capturing UV from a supernova
Another UVEX science team leader from UC Berkeley, Raffaella Margutti, along with Ryan Chornock, associate adjunct professor of astronomy, are interested in what UV data can tell us about exploding supernovae.
“Our goal is to acquire the first UV spectra of very young supernovae less than two days after they explode,” said Margutti, professor of physics and of astronomy. “If we can get the first time sequence of UV spectra from a supernova, it can help constrain the chemical composition of exploding stars and help us understand their behavior in the last moments of their evolution before core-collapse.”
Other UC Berkeley members of the UVEX team are Wenbin Lu, assistant professor of astronomy, and Miller Research Fellow Yuhan Yao, who focus on high-energy transient phenomena, and Joshua Bloom, an astronomy professor who works on ways to combine data from multiple satellites and telescopes in order to respond quickly to transient events.
NASA selected the UVEX Medium-Class Explorer (MIDEX) concept to continue into development after a detailed review of two proposed MIDEX missions and two Mission of Opportunity concepts, and after evaluating the proposals based on NASA’s current astrophysics portfolio and the agency's available resources.
The UVEX mission was the only proposal selected, but its launch was pushed back two years, to 2030, because of budgetary reasons. The two-year mission will cost approximately $300 million, not including launch costs.
Craig, who has managed several other NASA-funded missions, including the Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, which launched in 2019, noted that UVEX is a much larger satellite and has about twice the budget as ICON.
SSL has also been mission control for numerous other space missions, including the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, and NuStar, an X-ray observing satellite that was also a collaboration with Fiona Harrison of Caltech.
“I think you could say that this represents a sort of validation of the fact that Berkeley and the Space Sciences Lab have built up a core competency in implementing missions that allow us to do the science that people want to do,” Craig said.
The UVEX satellite will have an elongated shape, like a shed, to accommodate the optical components of the telescope. It will measure 20 feet tall, 9 1/2 feet wide and 8 feet deep and will weigh about 2,200 pounds.
Its intended orbit, which requires one loop around the moon to establish, will at its farthest point be about 310,000 miles from Earth — closer to the moon than to our planet. This allows it to avoid the thermal stresses associated with entering and exiting Earth's shadow many times a day, which is typical of stationary satellites in low-Earth orbit.
While Craig focuses over the next six years on bringing the many pieces of the satellite together, the scientists have their own intense prep work.
“We have a ton to do because this is a two-year mission, and we're supposed to deliver everything within six months after the prime mission ends,” Weisz said. “If our job is to go find 100 million galaxies, we basically have to know how to do that before we even launch. No one's ever tried to find 100 million galaxies before across the entire sky because we've never been able to do it. So as soon as we launch and get calibrated, we're going right into science mode.”
Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Middletown Area Town Hall is planning to hold a special meeting early next week to discuss the revised plan to bring a major new resort to the south county.
MATH will meet at 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 2, in the Middletown Community Meeting Room/Library at 21256 Washington St., Middletown.
The meeting is open to the public and is in-person only.
The group will discuss and consider action on the “request for review” from the Lake County Community Development Department regarding the revised Guenoc Valley Mixed Use Planned Development Project.
Community Development is asking agencies and organizations, including MATH, to determine if additional information is needed, which permits are required, and to outline environmental concerns and give recommendations for any modifications to the project to reduce potential environmental impacts.
The county is asking that comments be submitted as soon as possible, but no later than April 12.
Community Development also is planning to hold a meeting on the project in Lakeport, with the date still to be determined.
As a result, MATH is calling the special meeting and will discuss and prepare a response to the request for review.
That response will then be forwarded to the MATH membership for review before the regular April 11 meetings so that it can be submitted to Community Development by the April 12 deadline.
MATH — established by resolution of the Lake County Board of Supervisors on Dec. 12, 2006 — is a municipal advisory council serving the residents of Anderson Springs, Cobb, Coyote Valley (including Hidden Valley Lake), Long Valley and Middletown.
For more information email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
Recovering after tornadoes, particularly in small towns, has many challenges. AP Photo/Julio Cortez
People often think of disasters as great equalizers. After all, a tornado, wildfire or hurricane doesn’t discriminate against those in its path. But the consequences for those impacted are not “one-size-fits-all.”
Overall, the Census Bureau estimates that nearly 2.5 million Americans had to leave their homes because of disasters in 2023, whether for a short period or much longer. However, a closer look at demographics in the survey reveals much more about disaster risk in America and who is vulnerable.
It suggests, as researchers have also found, that people with the fewest resources, as well as those who have disabilities or have been marginalized, were more likely to be displaced from their homes by disasters than other people.
Disasters like hurricanes can cut electricity and running water to homes for weeks at a time, and can make access to retrieve medication and belongings for those displaced nearly impossible.AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
Decades of disaster research, including from our team at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center, make at least two things crystal clear: First, people’s social circumstances – such as the resources available to them, how much they can rely on others for help, and challenges they face in their daily life – can lead them to experience disasters differently compared to others affected by the same event. And second, disasters exacerbate existing vulnerabilities.
This research also shows how disaster recovery is a social process. Recovery is not a “thing,” but rather it is linked to how we talk about recovery, make decisions about recovery and prioritize some activities over others.
This recovery process is made even more difficult because policymakers often underappreciate the immense difficulties residents face during recovery.
Following Hurricane Katrina, sociologist Alexis Merdjanoff found that property ownership status affected psychological distress and displacement, with displaced renters showing higher levels of emotional distress than homeowners. Lack of autonomy in decisions about how to repair or rebuild can play a role, further highlighting disparate experiences during disaster recovery.
What the Census shows about vulnerability
The 2023 census data consistently showed that socially vulnerable groups reported being displaced from their homes at higher rates than other groups.
People over 65 had a higher rate of being displaced than younger people. So did Hispanic and Black Americans, people with less than a high school education and those with low household incomes or who were struggling with employment compared to other groups. While the Census Bureau describes the data as experimental and notes that some sample sizes are small, the differences stand out and are consistent with what researchers have found.
The morass of bureaucracy and conflicting information can also be a barrier to a swift recovery.
FEMA typically sets up recovery centers near disaster sites to help residents apply for federal aid. But getting to centers like this one near Lahaina, Hawaii, where a fire destroyed much of the town in 2023, can be difficult for people displaced by disasters.Department of Homeland Security
Residents who don’t know how to find information about disaster recovery assistance or can’t take time away from work to accumulate the necessary documents and meet with agency representatives can have a harder time getting quick help from federal and state agencies.
Disabilities also affect displacement. Of those people who were displaced for some length of time in 2023, those with significant difficulty hearing, seeing or walking reported being displaced at higher rates than those without disabilities.
Prolonged loss of electricity or water due to an ice storm, wildfire or grid overload during a heat emergency can force those with medical conditions to leave even if their neighbors are able to stay.
That can also create challenges for their recovery. Displacement can leave vulnerable disaster survivors isolated from their usual support systems and health care providers. It can also isolate those with limited mobility from disaster assistance.
Helping communities build resilience
Crucial research efforts are underway to better help people who may be struggling the most after disasters.
For example, our center was part of an interdisciplinary team that developed a framework to predict community resilience after disasters and help identify investments that could be made to bolster resilience. It outlines ways to identify gaps in community functioning, like health care and transportation, before disaster strikes. And it helps determine recovery strategies that would have the most impact.
Shifts in weather and climate and a mobile population mean that people’s exposure to hazards are constantly shifting and often increasing. The Coastal Hazard, Equity, Economic Prosperity, and Resilience Hub, which our center is also part of, is developing tools to help communities best ensure resilience and strong economic conditions for all residents without shortchanging the need to prioritize equity and well-being.
We believe that when communities experience disasters, they should not have to choose among thriving economically, ensuring all residents can recover and reducing risk of future threats. There must be a way to account for all three.
Understanding that disasters affect people in different ways is only a first step toward ensuring that the most vulnerable residents receive the support they need. Involving community members from disproportionately vulnerable groups to identify challenges is another. But those, alone, are not enough.
If we as a society care about those who contribute to our communities, we must find the political and organizational will to act to reduce the challenges reflected in the census and disaster research.
This article, originally published March 4, 2024, has been updated with severe storms in mid-March.
We collected audio recordings in 103 languages, and we decided how to convert these into waveforms that show these sounds visually. Colleagues from NASA etched these waveforms into the metal plate that shields the spacecraft’s sensitive electronics from Jupiter’s harsh radiation.
I also designed another part of the message that visually depicts the wavelengths of water’s constituents, because water is so important to the search for intelligent life in the universe.
NASA’s design for the Clipper message heading to Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Etching messages into spacecraft isn’t a new practice, and Clipper’s message fits into a decades-old tradition started by astronomer Carl Sagan.
In 1972 and 1973, two Pioneer spacecraft headed to Jupiter and Saturn carrying metal plaques engraved with scientific and pictorial messages. In 1977, two Voyager spacecraft headed to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Nepture bearing gold-plated copper phonograph records. These records contained tutorials in mathematics and chemistry, as well as music, photos and sounds of Earth and greetings in 55 languages.
Water words
As water is essential for life on Earth, searching for its presence elsewhere has been key to many NASA missions. Astronomers suspect that Europa, where Clipper is headed, has an ocean underneath its icy surface, making it a prime candidate for the search for life in the outer solar system.
Part of the Clipper message features the word for water in 103 languages. We started with audio files collected online, but we then needed to analyze those and find an output that could be engraved on a metal plate. I ended up going back to some of the techniques I used in some of my early psycholinguistic research, where I explored how emotions are encoded in speech.
The 103 spoken words we recorded represent a global snapshot of the diversity of Earth’s languages. The outward-facing side of the Clipper plate shows the words as waveforms that track the varying intensity of sound as each word is spoken.
Each person whom we recorded saying the word “water” for the waveform had a connection to water. For example, the lawyer who contributed the word for water in Uzbek – “suv” – organizes an annual music festival in Uzbekistan to raise awareness of the desertification of the Aral Sea.
The native speaker of the Catalan water word – “aigua” – hunts for exoplanets, discovering potentially habitable planets that orbit other stars.
The Drake Equation
Clipper’s message also pays homage to astronomer Frank Drake, the father of SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – by bearing the Drake Equation, his namesake formula. By drawing on scientific data, as well as some best guess hunches, the Drake Equation estimates the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy currently sending messages into the cosmos.
By one widely quoted estimate, there are a tenth as many of these extraterrestrial civilizations as one’s average lifetime in years. If civilizations survive for a million years, for example, there should be about 100,000 in the galaxy. If they last only a century on average, scientists would estimate that about 10 exist.
Radio astronomers study the universe by examining the radiation that chemical elements in space give off. They spend much of their time mapping the distribution of the most abundant chemical in the universe – hydrogen.
Hydrogen emits radiation at a certain frequency called the hydrogen line, which radio telescopes can detect. During Project Ozma, the first modern-day SETI experiment, Drake looked for artificial signals at the same frequency, because he figured scientists on other worlds might recognize hydrogen as universally significant and broadcast signals at that frequency.
The water hole
As our team developed our water words message, I realized that the message would only make sense if it were discovered by someone already familiar with the contents inscribed on the plate. The Drake Equation would only make sense if someone already knew what each of the terms in the equation stood for.
The Europa Clipper will crash into Jupiter or one of its other moons, with Ganymede or Callisto the leading candidates. But if for some reason the mission changes and it survives that fate, then humans far in the future with a radically different cultural background and different language conventions may retrieve it millennia from now as an ancient artifact.
To ensure we had at least one part of the message that a distant future scientist might be able to understand, I also designed a pictorial representation of the same frequency that Drake used for Project Ozma: the hydrogen line. We engraved this on the Clipper plate, along with a frequency called the hydroxyl line.
When hydrogen (H+) and hydroxyl (OH-) combine, they form water. Scientists call the range of frequencies between these lines the “water hole.” The water hole represents the part of the radio spectrum where astronomers conducted the first SETI experiments.
We displayed the hydrogen and hydroxyl lines using their wavelengths in the Clipper message. The metal plate also has diagrams showing what hydrogen and hydroxyl look like at the atomic level.
We’re hoping that future chemists would recognize these chemical components as the ingredients of water. If they do, we will have succeeded in communicating at least a few core scientific concepts across time, space and language.
Waveforms let our team tie the messages on the two sides of the Clipper plate together. On the water words side, over a hundred words are depicted by their waveforms. On the other side, the wavelengths of hydrogen and hydroxyl – the constituents of water – are etched into the plate.
METI International funded the collection and curation of the water words, as well as my design of the hydrogen and hydroxyl lines, providing these to NASA at no cost.
While designing the message for the Europa Clipper, we got to reflect on the importance of water on Earth, and think about why astronomers feel so compelled to search for it beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The spacecraft is scheduled to enter Jupiter’s orbit in April 2030.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — After a rainy Wednesday and Thursday, the National Weather Service said Lake County can expect more rain ahead of the Easter holiday.
The National Weather Service’s Eureka office said “a second round of wind and gusty showers will hit the southern half of the area on Friday with cool and clearing conditions through the weekend.”
Across the region, the heavier rainfall amounts are expected in Lake and Mendocino counties. “Wind turning east through the event will generally focus rain along higher terrain and rain shadow lower elevation areas such as Clear Lake itself,” the forecast said.
In addition, the forecast calls for increasing east-southeast winds on Friday afternoon and evening, mainly focused over Mendocino and Lake counties.
Easterly winds may aid in funneling gusty winds in Lake County. Forecast models suggest wind gusts could be up to 45 miles per hour in Lake County, with the strongest winds over the higher elevations.
Lake County could see as much as 2 inches of rain on Friday, with less than a tenth of an inch expected on Saturday morning.
Conditions are forecast to begin clearing by Saturday night, with Easter Sunday expected to be mostly sunny.
Next week is supposed to remain clear and sunny, based on the forecast.
Daytime temperatures on Friday will be in the 40s, edging into the low 50s on Saturday and Sunday, before rising into the high 60s and low 70s for the rest of the week.
Nighttime conditions on Friday and Saturday will dip into the 30s before rising into the low 40s through Wednesday.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Clearlake Animal Control has many great dogs waiting for new homes.
The Clearlake Animal Control website lists 44 adoptable dogs.
“Gator.” Photo courtesy of Clearlake Animal Control. This week’s dogs include “Gator,” a male German shepherd mix with a tan and black coat.
“Joey.” Photo courtesy of Clearlake Animal Control. Also up for adoption is “Joey,” an 8-month-old male pit bull terrier mix with a short brown coat.
"Emily." Photo courtesy of Clearlake Animal Control.
There also is “Emily,” a 16-month-old female Doberman pinscher with a red and copper coat.
The shelter is located at 6820 Old Highway 53. It’s open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
For more information, call the shelter at 707-762-6227, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.
This week’s adoptable dogs are featured below.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
As California’s Naloxone Distribution Project, or NDP, delivers millions of naloxone kits that have resulted in more than 247,000 reported opioid overdose reversals, on Thursday the state announced the project will now also offer fentanyl test strips to eligible organizations.
The test strips detect the presence of fentanyl, offering another tool to prevent overdoses.
“Harm reduction programs like this one are a huge part of how we better protect people, how we get them into treatment,” said California Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly. “This work is time tested. Shame isn't a solution; support and science-driven policy is.”
A critical component of California’s all-hands-on-deck approach to addressing a confluence of overdose crises, NDP has distributed more than 3,918,000 kits of naloxone, resulting in more than 247,000 reported opioid overdose reversals.
The addition of test strips to that toolkit will work to prevent overdoses in the first place — and add another opportunity to connect people with recovery support and treatment.
As part of ongoing, statewide efforts, California released the Master Plan for Tackling the Fentanyl and Opioid Crisis to support overdose prevention efforts like those announced Thursday.
Recently, the state launched Opioids.ca.gov, a one-stop-shop for Californians seeking resources around prevention and treatment, as well as information on how California is working to hold Big Pharma and drug-traffickers accountable in this crisis.
Allan Steigleman, University of Florida and Elizabeth M. Hofmeister, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
Cataract surgery is one of the most popular and commonly performed procedures in the world. The vast majority of patients have excellent outcomes with few complications.
Over 90% of patients have 20/20 vision with glasses after surgery, although those with other eye conditions may not do as well, including those with glaucoma, a progressive disease typically associated with elevated pressure within the eye; diabetic retinopathy, which ultimately can cause leakage in the retinal tissues; and macular degeneration, a disease that is typically related to age.
We like to compare a cataract with the frosted glass of a bathroom window, where light can be transmitted but details cannot. Or when turbulence from a storm causes normally clear water in the ocean to become murky. In much the same way, the eye’s once transparent lens becomes cloudy.
After surgery, there’s no bending, inversions, lifting or straining, high-impact activities or eye makeup for one to two weeks or until the doctor says it’s OK.
About the surgery
Cataract surgery removes the clouded lens of the eye and replaces it with a new, clear lens to restore your vision. Most patients report the procedure is painless.
It’s typically an elective surgery that is performed on an outpatient basis. The patient is often awake, under local anesthesia, with sedation similar to that used for dental procedures. We like to say patients receive the equivalent of three margaritas in their IV.
Numbing drops are then applied to the eye’s surface, along with an anesthetic inside the eye. Patients with claustrophobia, or movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, may not be suitable candidates for awake surgeries and require general anesthesia.
Before surgery, patients receive dilating drops to make the pupil as large as possible. The surgeon makes a tiny incision, usually with a small pointed scalpel, between the clear and white part of the eye to gain access to the lens capsule, a thin membrane similar in thickness to a plastic produce bag at the grocery store.
This capsule is suspended by small fibers called zonules, which are arranged like the springs that suspend a trampoline from a frame. The surgeon then creates a small opening in the capsule, called a capsulotomy, to gain access to the cataract. The cataract is then broken into smaller parts so they are removable through the small incision.
This is similar to a tiny jackhammer, breaking the large lens into smaller pieces for removal. That sounds scary, but it’s painless. Ultrasound emulsifies the lens and vacuum power then aspirates it from the eye.
Serious complications, such as postoperative infection, bleeding in the eye or a postoperative retinal detachment are rare; they occur in approximately 1 in 1,000 cases. But even in many of these situations, appropriate management can salvage useful vision.
Capsular complications deserve additional discussion. According to some studies, they occur in up to 2% of cases. If a hole or tear of the posterior capsule is encountered during cataract surgery, the clear gel in the vitreous – the back chamber of the eye – may be displaced into the front chamber of the eye.
If that happens, the gel must be removed at the time of the cataract surgery. This will reduce the likelihood of additional postoperative complications, but those who have the procedure, known as a vitrectomy, have an increased risk for additional complications, including postoperative infections and postoperative swelling.
After the surgery
Patients usually go home right after the procedure. Most surgery centers require that the patient have someone drive them home, more for the anesthesia rather than the surgery. Patients begin applying postoperative drops that same day and must wear an eye shield at bedtime for a few weeks after surgery.
Patients should keep the eye clean and avoid exposure to dust, debris and water. They should try not to bend over and should avoid heavy lifting or straining in the first week or so after surgery. Lifting or straining can cause a surge of blood pressure to the face and eye. Known as a choroidal hemorrhage, it can lead to bleeding into the wall of the eye and be devastating to vision.
Things that cause only moderate increases in heart rate such as walking are OK. Routine postoperative examinations are usually completed the day after surgery, about a week after surgery and about a month after surgery.
Light and UV exposure, coupled with time, causes the lens of the eye to become increasingly cloudy.
A choice of lens
The plastic lens used to replace the cataract, or intraocular lens, requires careful sizing for optimal results and a nuanced discussion between patient and surgeon.
Early intraocular lens technologies were monofocal, and most patients with these lenses chose distance correction and used reading glasses for near tasks. This is still the preferred approach for approximately 90% of patients having cataract surgery today.
Recent advances have led to intraocular lenses that offer multifocality – the opportunity to have near as well as distance vision, without glasses. Some multifocal lenses are even in the trifocal category, which includes distance, near, and intermediate vision, the latter of which in recent years has become very important for computer and phone use.
Most patients with these advanced technology multifocal lenses are happy with them. However, a small percentage of patients with multifocal lenses can be so bothered by visual disturbances – notably night glare and halos around light sources in the dark – that they request removal of the multifocal lens to exchange it for a standard intraocular lens. These exchanges are a reasonable option for such situations and offer relief for most affected patients.
Determining who’s an ideal candidate for a multifocal intraocular lens is an area of active research. Most clinicians would recommend against such a lens for a patient with a detail-oriented personality. Such patients tend to fixate on the shortcomings of these lenses despite their potential advantages.
As with many technologies, current generation advanced technology intraocular lenses are much better than their predecessors. Future offerings are likely to offer improved vision and fewer side effects than those available today.
But these newer lenses are often not reimbursed by insurance companies and often entail substantial out-of-pocket costs for patients.
Deciding on what type of lens is best for you can be complicated. Fortunately, except in unusual circumstances, such as when a cataract develops after trauma to the eye, there is seldom a hurry for adult cataract surgery.
Brenda Yeager, the 2024-2026 Lake County poet laureate. Courtesy photo. LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County’s newest poet laureate will be inaugurated this weekend.
Brenda Yeager, the 2024-2026 Lake County poet laureate, will be celebrated in an event on Saturday, March 30.
The event will take place from 1 to 3 p.m. at Fore Family Vineyards Tasting Room, 3924 Main St. in Kelseyville.
The celebration also will include a farewell to outgoing poet laureate, Georgina Marie Guardado, who served two terms in the role.
There will be readings from former poets laureate and Yeager, along with refreshments and light snacks provided.
In addition to the in-person event on March 30, there will be a virtual inauguration via Zoom on Monday, April 1, from 5 to 7 p.m.
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