Many times patients are anxious and nervous about having cataract surgery. When you think about the description, “we enter the eye and then go behind the iris to break up and remove your human lens then wash it out of the eye and finally replace it with a man-made lens,” it sounds scary. Patients in our center receive intra-venous sedation as well as the ocular anesthetics (topical and intra-cameral) to make for an easy and pain-free experience. However some patients still have quite a bit of anxiety about the procedure and this is when it is very helpful for the surgeon to administer ‘verbal anesthesia’ which means talking the patients through the procedure to calm and distract them. I have previously featured a video giving the typical script that I use during these cases, and today our video features a Brazilian surgeon. I don’t speak Portuguese, but I can tell from the intonation of the surgeon’s voice that he is distracting and calming the patient. For my Brazilian viewers, please let me know the gist of the conversation in the comment section below.
