Tuesday 3 January 2012

Emergency Eye Test

I have just come home from the hospital after an emergency eye referral by my doctor this morning. I have been seeing flashing lights and have got an increase in the number of floaters I usually see plus a fine web like structure across my vision. This started on Christmas Day. I was concerned as it is in the same eye that the hospital is already investigating and was worried I might be having a retinal detachment. Luckily it is a Posterior Vitreous Detachment (PVD).

That means the gel inside my eye has become watery rather than a thick gel, slightly collapsed and pulled away from the retina (which causes the retina to send help signals to the brain hence the flashing). It will happen to about 75% of us, usually around 65 - I am quite a bit younger than that but hey, these things happen!

The floaters are dead cells clumping together in the thinning gel, being pushed together in the decreasing space. He says my retina is fine, I have nothing to worry about and as the flashing is now disappearing, the brain will learn to ignore the floaters.

So, all that is good news.


2 comments:

  1. Good news indeed, you must be so relieved. My mum experienced something similar in 2010 - a possible detached retina, but when she was examined it was bulging but hadn't detached. It settled down in time, though she does still get floaters. I had them too , but they were due to cataracts. My first developed so fast I was blind in that eye within months. Within 6 weeks of that being found, I had one in my other eye. That one developed much more slowly and took 2 years to need surgery.I was 43 when the first was operated on, and it has started to fail so I will need holes lasering in it at some point. I was warned that would be the case because of my relatively young age for surgery.

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  2. I've always seen small linear floaters, quite like watching them against a blue summer sky! I suppose the younger you are when things happen (like hip replacements for example), the more you may need doing further down the line.

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