I understood why it was simply understood and accepted that old people would lose their vision. I am so glad that is no longer the case.
I had my cataract surgery at age 63, somewhat on the young side. It's hard to express what a huge difference it made in my vision. These days, when I wake up in the morning and look across the room, I can actually read the clock. Wow. That's something I had never been able to do. When I was in first grade I could not see the blackboard properly, even though I was very short and sat in the front row. I got glasses that next summer, and I have always been grateful I lived in a century where things like glasses were possible. Several hundred years earlier I'd have just lived a life of limited vision.
I'd known for a couple of decades that I was growing cataracts, and when my eye doctor said It's time for the surgery, I called up a friend of mine who was in her 80s to ask for advice. My first thought was to delay the surgery a couple of years so that Medicare would pay more. My wonderful friend said, "Poindexter! Get the surgery!" She was right, and I have zero regrets. Yes, it cost me a lot, but I could also (with a bit of struggling and money juggling) afford it.
The other interesting thing was that every single doctor appointment I went to I was by at least a decade the youngest person there. Again, I was only 63. All of the older people had put off getting the cataract surgery they desperately needed because they remembered what it had been like for their own parents, some thirty or more years earlier, and didn't understand how much cataract surgery had changed over the decades.
So, yeah, if you've been told it's time for cataract surgery, get it done.
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