The patients were lined up in reclining chairs, waiting their turns. When the surgery center’s anesthesiologist reached her, Kathleen White yelped in pain as he injected a numbing agent into her left eye. An assistant whisked her into the operating room for her scheduled cataract surgery.


The surgery lasted no more than 15 minutes — her surgeon had 45 cases on the schedule that day — and seemed to go smoothly. But at a follow-up appointment the next day, a staffer removed the patch over White’s eye and told her to read the letters on a wall chart.

“I can’t,” White recalls telling her. “Everything is black.’’

...