Stupid floaters

Yesterday while driving, I noticed a sudden swarm of black dots in my field of vision. Sometimes, especially if sunlight is glinting in weird ways off of cars and buildings, you see little afterimages that go away after a minute or two.

But these did not go away. They seemed to be only in my right eye, were most noticeable against a bright flat surface (like the sky, or a sheet of paper, or my computer monitor), and there were dozens and dozens of them. Little tiny translucent black dots in a cluster, directly in the center of my vision.

It looked a lot like this:

When I had cataract surgery last fall, they told me to watch for things like bright flashes of light in my eyes or new floaters, since those can be signs of a retinal tear or detachment, an emergency condition that requires immediate medical attention.

So of course I immediately checked in with Dr. Google and he said that yes, showers of tiny floater dots means your retinas are imminently detaching! PANIC!

I didn’t actually completely panic (to my credit! yay!), but instead called my eye doctor and they got me in at 7:30 this morning, which tells me that they thought it was serious enough to check out right away.

Dr. Reuter (who is way smarter than Dr. Google) shone this irritatingly intense light directly into my eyeball for several minutes without ceasing, and determined that:

1. my retina is not torn or detached, and
2. I have an area of Thickened Eyeball Jelly™ that’s pulled away from its attachment site.

So apparently, as we age, our eyeball jelly (technically called “vitreous”) shrinks, thickens, and begins to pull away from being securely attached to our retinas. This is different from and far less serious than a retinal tear, detachment, hole, or pucker (hehe, I said hole and pucker), and happens to all of us over time. (If you want to be extra grossed out and learn more, check out this article at nih.gov, which has not — as yet — been removed by 47’s administration.)

Anyway, I have one of these little thickened areas where the attachment site has become unstable, and although it apparently usually hangs out on the periphery of my eyeball, yesterday it decided to take a little field trip into the center of my vision.

The doctor said he’s not overly concerned about it, but I go in for a followup in a month. It may gradually sink to the bottom of my eyeball where I won’t notice it anymore, or it might go back to its previous spot in the periphery, or it may decide to permanently reside right in the middle of my vision.

I have so many floaters already — it’s like viewing the world through dirty pond water 24/7 — that I guess 84 new ones aren’t the end of the world. I mean, it’s not like there are options for getting rid of them other than a vitrectomy, which is exactly what it sounds like. (Suck out old eyeball jelly, replace with synthetic, run lots of risks… definitely a treatment of last resort.)