Getting Old Sure is Fun

[Aragorn243]

Had a bit of a medial scare yesterday and today. After we ate our Easter dinner, I was getting ready to take some things to the recycling center and I noticed a "hair" above and to the right of my right eye. But I couldn't find it. I asked my daughter to look, and she didn't find anything. Then I noticed "hairs" in my lower field of vision. So, I start rolling my eyes and it's inside.

I immediately think retinal tear as I have several friends that went through it, and I just had a client three days ago that had just had surgery to correct it. I checked the symptoms and sure enough, they fit.

Phone call to the VA and they advise me to come in so off to the ER. The doc there says he does not see a tear but advises me to come in the next day to see an eye specialist so that's what I did today. This morning, I wake up, the hairs are gone but I have large floaters everywhere and my vision is a little cloudy.

Exam also shows no tear and I'm diagnosed with vitreous detachment which is a "normal" part of aging no one ever warned me about. There is no treatment for it, it's fairly benign and your brain eventually learns to filter out the floaters, but this can take weeks. Right now, I have difficulty reading and I'm right in my yearly paperwork period with tax season coming up in two weeks. Fun Fun. I slept this afternoon; my eyes were dilated huge and even though it's raining it looked like the sun was out.

On the positive side, I asked about getting a cataract removed and they said they will do it there so I don't need to pay out of pocket for it. I just have to wait until this gets sorted out to schedule that. I go back in a month for a second exam. This can lead to a retinal tear but it is rare, something like 1% of cases.

Information

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[Low & Slow]

Best of luck with that mess. Those floaters are annoying, especially the big ones. As long as the retina stays put, I'm good for now.

[Sapper740]

Floaters are a fact of life for us old farts. (Am I allowed to say 'Farts'?)

[Fushigi Ojisan]

PVDs are a privilege of age, but they can result in retina issues if they don't detach cleanly, normally 30 days is the window for that.

Your public service announcement: If the floaters look like little round circles, those are red blood cells, there is an issue.

A retinal tear looks like a "void" in your vision at the bottom. If you go from a light to dark environment and the void does the opposite, it's a tear.

Rather than an ER, learn where your closest retina specialists are.

The attached image is pretty darn close to what a tear looks like, only bigger

[Sapper740]

While we're talking about eyesight, does anyone else experience a bright white short-lived expanding ring in their vision that promptly disappears? Someone once told me that's a Cosmic ray hitting a molecule in the vitreous humour.

[Fushigi Ojisan]

The tear is bigger in that image than real life

[Aragorn243]

Bright light is a symptom of both the virtuous and retinal detachment. I have it sometimes to the extreme right of my right eye. Just started with the rest of this mess. I can see to do things today but the floaters are pretty bad. Hoping the brain soon sorts them out like they say it will.

I was given numerous warning signs to watch out for. They said the risk of a tear is small but enough that I do back to get checked in five weeks. They said everything looks like a clean seperation. I can expect the same thing to happen with my left eye within the year. I have severe nearsightedness so I'm at a higher risk for this than average.

[Bob Womack]

Yeah, well. I know what you are feeling. I just got the "magic letter" from my insurance stating that I have exceeded my out-of-pocket maximum for the year because of a hospital stay in January. My wife got hers for total knee replacement two weeks before that. We've now got a passel of bills to figure out, but it is time to get a few things done that I have been waiting on.


Bob

[Daan Kemp]

The foaters go away after a time. Life goes on.