Floaters

[davidlevine]

Last week I noticed that I was cleaning my glasses, and cleaning my glasses, and cleaning my glasses, and my vision wasn't getting better. The problem was not in the glasses, but in my left eye. Floaters.

Anyone who has read my story "Floaters" will understand why I was a bit creeped out by this.

Now, I've had floaters for years, and they are usually nothing to worry about, but these were a lot worse than I'd had previously and they seemed to have come on suddenly, so I made an appointment to have the eye checked out.

Well, the good news is that there's nothing unusual or seriously wrong, it's just a common age-related complaint called posterior vitreous detachment. My retina is still firmly attached, but when you get to a certain age, especially if you are nearsighted, the jelly inside your eye kind of shrinks and separates from the eye wall, and that's what I'm seeing. The process of detachment takes about 6 weeks, and "now would be a bad time to take up kickboxing." I love my eye doctor (whose name is, as it happens, Dr. Love).

The bad news is that these floaters are not going to go away, and I can probably look forward to the same in the other eye one of these years. Oh, well.

On the other hand, with my new insurance I only had to pay a $15 co-pay for the visit (thank you, Obamacare) and with only one eye dilated I get to freak people out all day. So, all in all, it's a win.

Comments

[wild_irises]

When this happened to me some years ago (actually, when I started seeing flashes, which is kind of the next step down that road), my optometrist said, "Make friends with your floaters." Not an easy task, at least for me, but I think about it a lot.

[davidlevine]

Dr. Love suggested I name them.