Sunday, December 18, 2011

Spontaneous Eruption

The third setback of a dislodged floater that obscured my vision yet again occurred in May, 2011. This one came with no apparent cause. No temper loss or general over exertion preceded it. Life was calm enough at the time.
The primary pattern of these releases was timing. More gunk had spontaneously appeared in the eye every three months: November, February and then May.
Doctor Arrigg at Joslin Center proved himself no value to me in diagnosing or explaining the setbacks. In hindsight–quickly becoming my only form of vision–I know he just wasn’t one to share bad news. His failure to communicate about these specific concerns of floater releases was one of the major influences on my dissatisfaction and disillusionment with him. He left me alone to figure out what was going on. He seemed to have plenty to say to other doctors when I was out of earshot, but he offered me no causation or solution, just generic "These things happen to people who have been through what you have."
I tried to convince myself that all was OK, that the releases of massive black shadows and clouds in my eyes was just scar tissue from the original bloody vitreous hemorrhage. I think I did a good job convincing concerned parties of that. I am not a very good liar. I was better at lying to others than to myself.
Each release left aftereffects in its wake. Some of the effects were consistent with retinapathy, but others proved completely different from anything that had happened with the comparatively quick loss of my right eye.
Gridlines warped, where tile floors looked wavy. The general increased haze healed less each time; the visual effect could have been retinapathy just as easily as it could be simple contamination of my already dirty vitreous fluid.
Some aspects proved nothing like what happened during the retinapathy loss of the right eye. Through the right eye’s pinhole, I see poorly. The small field of vision looks through a dense cataract, and the eye is misaligned. The eye cannot quite look where the brain commands it to look. Yet that eye retains excellent color vision while every setback in the left eye reduced color vision more.
The right eye is also not overly light sensitive. The left eye refuses to process light. It’s either too light or too dark for me in most environments. The controlled lighting of the regulated sports venue of the bowling alley is my easiest environment. There, no lights flash into my eye but there is even, surrounding illumination.
Outside at night, a streetlight is too bright for me to look at and emits a size-doubling halo. Yet I can see very little of its light hitting the ground.
Adjustment between light and dark increased in difficulty. The shadow of a tree on a sunny day conceals almost everything.
My newest doctor said I have the most complicated eyes he has ever seen. The general combination of problems has rendered me increasingly helpless on all fronts and is fading fast.

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