It’s been a bad couple of weeks on the eye paranoia front. On a scale of one to ten (one = I don’t even think about my eye issues, and ten = ringing Moorfields and looking up train times whilst trying to breathe evenly in order to calm my pounding heart), I’ve probably been about a seven or eight this week. The fact that it was my first week back at work doing full-time hours probably hasn’t helped matters. Even on a good day, my eye aches and feels uncomfortable. After a full day at work on a computer (even with breaks and leaving on time), I’ve been coming home with my eyes feeling scratchy and sore, and so tired that I just want to close them and sleep. Just to add another dig in the ribs, my companion Insomnia has been rearing her ugly head again, too. I can’t bring myself to do what a friend was once advised for his insomnia – go downstairs and read the ‘phone book until he felt tired and then go back to bed and try and sleep. So instead I just shift from one side to the other (still not allowed to sleep on my back), and try to think of happy things… like the day when there will be a miraculous cure for retinal detachments without having to go through multiple surgeries and deal with sometimes crippling anxiety about repeat detachments.
The paranoia of the past couple of weeks started when i parked my car one sunny saturday morning and looked up at the blue sky, blinked, and saw a grey circle hovering threateningly in the sky. I blinked again and it was gone. Closed my eyes, opened them, and there it was again. Blinked, and it was gone. I must have sat there in the car for a good twenty minutes doing this like some kind of lunatic, before I noticed that there was a circular sign just in front of the car with a white border. I now *think* that what I was seeing was a kind of after image of this. I spent the rest of the day at various points stopping dead, staring up at blue sky and blinking, but I didn’t see it again.
I’d just about pacified myself over that, when the headaches started. Every few days. Not bad, but enough to feel pants and irritable. I started to think it must be my eye pressure going up, so I went off to the opticians to get the pressures checked. 18 in both eyes. Pheeeeew! That was okay then! So what was causing the headaches? Increased hours at work? Insomnia? Stress? All three most probably…
The headaches have improved over the past few days (I hope I don’t jinx it now), but my current paranoia involves looking right then left again, convinced I can see something pulling at the edge of my vision. I have had this before many times and asked about it at many of my appointments and am always told it’s okay. I even went and got my little eye book out the other day to check what’s been said about it in the past in the hopes that it would make me feel a bit better. I’ve never received a satisfactory answer about what exactly it is, but have been told ‘it could be the oil’. It seems I’m often told ‘it could be the oil’ when they’re not sure what it is. A bit like going to the GP and being told that you have ‘a virus’. But until I can ask about it again, it’s worrying me. Plus I seem to be getting some more flickering in a different area of my eye. I’m hoping this isn’t more of the retina starting to detach, as is the case with the almost psychadelic flickering which I often get at the bottom of my eye. I keep obsessively checking my visual field against the various markers in my house, and at the moment, thankfully, it seems to be unchanged. But I still worry, because I don’t know why it’s flickering. My next appointment isn’t until 28 September, which seems an age away at the moment. I fear I may be carted off in a straitjacket before that time.
RD Ramblings 