Floaters

I got a dead pixel recently.

I was driving R and H somewhere and I saw it there, just north of my center of vision in my left eye. It was like a speck of dust, but hard around the edges.

A pinprick in the sky.

I looked left, it went left. Up, it went up. Down, down.

Two years ago I learned that the squiggly little translucent worms that move across my vision at all times are called floaters, and they they are essentially shadows cast by bits of retinal matter floating through the center of my eyeball. I’m extremely short-sighted, and folks like me tend to have eyeballs have have grown too elongated over time, which stresses and stretches the retinas. My retinas have 360-degree lattice degeneration, which means that they are thinning and cracking up at the edges a bit, all the way around. Tiny holes are forming around their edges, and the goop inside my eye gets into the holes and can work its way under the retina and put it at increased risk for detachment.

The retinal specialist I saw two years ago likened retinas to wallpaper. My wallpaper has some holes around the edges. And if moisture gets into the holes, it can cause the wallpaper to bubble more and start peeling off in big chunks.

The dead pixel is a new thing for me, though. It’s not translucent and not squiggly. It’s more imposing and impressively distracting. It comes and goes, and sometimes its shape is softer. My new eye doctor (who is great! who also told me I have developed slight astigmatism, cool! who also told me that I now qualify for medically necessary AKA free contacts!) says that’s because it’s some sort of chunk that’s in there moving around and rotating, so I’m seeing its shadow at different angles and sometimes not at all.

I’ve been mapping its movements. It started out just north of center but then migrated to the southeast quadrant, then went north, then faded a bit and was in the periphery.

My eye doctor seconded the retinal specialist’s recommendation that I have laser surgery to essentially tack up the wallpaper and keep the retina from suddenly detaching. (Detachment would obviously be bad, and mean either partial or total blindness, if unable to be corrected.) Think of it like putting nails into the wall just to the side of where the wallpaper had started peeling, so that the bits that had already peeled could continue to do whatever, but the rest of the wall where the paper still adhered would be fine.

I’m not crazy about shooting lasers into my eyes, for obvious reasons including lasers and eyes. There could be some unexpected consequences, including complicating my already not great closer-up vision to the point where I’d have to wear bifocals all the time.

I’ve been avoiding doing this for two years, thinking surely I can put off actually doing anything, right? Everything can just stay as is for a while … until it’s not, right?

This morning, lying in bed with my eyes closed, I saw some flashes of light (a common sign your retina is detaching) and thought, Oh hell, here we go. The boy was in there, snuggled with us, and it wasn’t until he said, “Mom, I just saw lightning,” that I realized how I’m carrying this worry just below the surface at all times. When I wipe my eyes, I worry about pressing too forcefully. When I see things out of the corner of my eye, I have to investigate to make sure I have actually seen something. I’ve cut out almost all headbanging.

So I guess it’s time. Get those lasers warmed up.

photo by Simon Wicks via Flickr