Whoopi Goldberg is in touch with the future of eye surgery and regaining the ability to see and read without glasses.
She showed off her new glasses-free look on an episode of The View back on March 20. Her co-host, Sunny Hostin, was the first to point it out after explaining how she herself doesn’t wear her glasses while on air, but Whoopi “doesn’t have her glasses on today.”
“I had an operation,” The Color Purple star replied, “and they replaced the lens and the lens they replaced it with is kind of like my eyeglass lens.”
“Two weeks ago, when we had a show with the folks from Picard, I was trying to read the prompter without my actual glasses, and I couldn’t do it,” she explained. “So I ended up having to use [my glasses].”
She clarified that it wasn’t cataract surgery, rather an operation that dealt with presbyopia. According to the National Eye Institute, “Presbyopia is a refractive error that makes it hard for middle-aged and older adults to see things up close. It happens because the lens (an inner part of the eye that helps the eye focus) stops focusing light correctly on the retina (a light-sensitive layer of tissue at the back of the eye).”
Goldberg went on to explain that the operation wasn’t something that was particularly popularly advertised in the optic care world.
“This is something they’ve been doing for a while and people don’t know about it,” she said. “Your insurance will cover it, though you have to pay for the lens yourself.”
She proved her skills on the show by reading from a brochure that discussed the surgery she had done.
“If you have any issue with your eyes, I don’t know if it works for everybody but I’m telling you I’m sitting here able to read this [brochure],” she declared, explaining how she had the surgery done on only one of her eyes. “If you’re having any issues with your eyes, please go get them checked.”
“The bionic times have arrived!” she added.
She previously had eyewear news which she revealed on the February 1 episode of the daytime talk show.
“I need to tell you that I sat on my glasses yesterday,” she shared at the time. “I have on glasses that are maybe 4 years old, so, if you see me [squinting], that’s why. I just wanted y’all to know there’s nothing wrong — I just sat on the glasses, not paying a bit of attention to where my big behind was going. Just, click.”
But she needs not to worry about that happening again, as this is the first time in 28 years that the Star Trek: Next Generation alum hasn’t needed glasses.
“I’ve been wearing glasses now for almost 28 years. If you’re over 28, you know what I looked like before, when I was wearing sunglasses or cool glasses because they were cool,” she remembered. “If you’re under 28, you don’t know that there was a time that I didn’t have glasses, and now, this is what I look like! You know, it’s not so bad.”
Sources:
https://people.com/health/whoopi-goldberg-hosts-the-view-without-glasses-after-eye-surgery/
