TV’s Susannah: ‘Bionic’ surgery saved my sight

AS ONE of this country’s best known style gurus, Susannah Constantine is known for her sharp sartorial eye. And this week the What Not To Wear presenter underwent surgery to save one of her most prized assets.

The 57-year-old had been suffering from a condition that left her partially blind and unable to drive.

‘I had cataracts in my eyes and I couldn’t see, basically,’ she tells me.

‘I went to see a brilliant optician who detected what was wrong.’

Susannah, whose nononsense partnership with Trinny Woodall on the popular BBC show set television trends, had the operation on Thursday at the Sussex Eye Hospital in Brighton.

‘I went through the NHS,’ she says. ‘My vision was very blurry, I was partially blind. I couldn’t drive at night. I would drive at 20 miles per hour, and

every time a car came towards me, I would have to stop.’

Susannah (left) — who lives in Sussex with her Danish businessman husband, Sten Bertelsen, and their three teenage children — underwent the 45-minute procedure on her left eye. ‘It’s not a nice experience,’ she says. ‘Your eye is forced open and you have all these drops that are put in.

‘The chances of it going wrong are minuscule, but you feel the pressure and it’s a strange feeling — you’ve got this bright light being shone in your eye.’

Usually associated with people in their 60s and 70s, cataracts are now being detected in much younger patients thanks to medical advances. The operation has a high success rate, meaning Susannah’s vision could soon be fully restored. ‘It’s like having bionic eyes,’ she jokes. ‘I am starting to see clearly now. But the slight downside is that I look at my face and now I see all the lines because there’d been a film across my eye up until that point.’