No, not a feeling of detachment… a retinal detachment.

Some of you already know that I experienced a retinal detachment in my left eye late last week. To cut to the chase, the results of the medical procedure look good, and I’m very optimistic about the eventual outcome. Now that I’m recovering I thought I’d reply to all of the messages, questions, and support here in one place… and express gratitude for everyone’s concern and sympathy. Thank you!

So, what happened?

I’ve had the usual “floaters” in my eyes for a long time, so I didn’t pay much attention when I started seeing more of them in my left eye a while back — I figured it was just part of the typical process for aging eyes. However, late last week I noticed a dark “shadow” in the lower peripheral vision of my left eye, and it gradually expanded to become a significant dark area where I could not see. Since I helped my mother through an episode like this some years ago, I had a pretty good idea that  I was experiencing a retinal detachment, and I got to the doctor fairly quickly.

Retinal detachment is not uncommon, especially when the vitreous in our eyes detaches as we age, sometimes creating small tears in the retina. Fluid can then get beneath the retina, pushing it up from the structures underneath and cutting off blood flow, and then “turning out the lights” in that portion of the eye.

The first ophthalmologist quickly confirmed what I suspected and referred me to a senior ophthalmologist — who, it turned out, was the same doctor who had treated my mother many years ago. His exam confirmed the bad news that I did have a retinal detachment, but against that background there was quite a bit of relatively good news: the detachment was in the periphery of my vision and not beneath the macula, there appeared to be only a single tear in the retina, the detachment was in the upper half of my eye (things that appear “low” in our vision are projected on the upper part of the retina), we had likely caught it quickly enough, and I don’t have risk factors such as diabetes or previous eye surgery. Continue reading Detached →