Xmas day of 2022 I woke up with a weird vision anomaly. Best I can describe it is like the afterimage you get in your vision after looking at a bright light, then looking away. Almost like the world is negative colored in that area, or at least overlayed with a weird dark spot. The spot is approximately the size of my thumbnail held 12″ from my face.
Today, Aug 9, 2024, I woke up with the spot again. My right eye, again, haunted by this little one-eyed ghost buddy.
But before I move on and tell you all about it, I need to mention that the reason I’m writing about this today is because I would like to see if the internet can point me in the right direction to get this accurately diagnosed – do you know someone who had something similar happen, and figured out why it’s happening? Do you know of a good eye-doc who might have some insight? Contact me please!
In 2022, the spot also came (free of charge even!) with a weird distortion effect that looked like a little black hole. This time around I have the spot but no distortion. I do have eye strain, a little trouble seeing and reading things, and a headache presumably from my brain having to correct the incorrect visual input.
When it happened two years ago of course I went to the doctor, starting with my primary care physician. They checked me out then referred me to local optometrist. Three appointments, one eye dilation, and a cat scan later I was referred to an ophthalmologist. The optometrists found nothing concerning in the cat scan in my brain or in the optic nerve (phew), but also still had pretty much no idea what was going on (not-phew). They did find a weird “bubble” directly in front of my right eye’s retina, which explains the distortion, but not the spot.
OH ALSO, during these appointments I found out something REALLY FUN about myself – I get VIOLENTLY NAUSEOUS when doing eye tests where they point a light in your eye and move it side to side and up and down. They did this or a similar test three times, and I threw up each and every time!! They had to prescribe me anti-nausea medication – thankfully that prevented the automatic puke response in future appointments.
With how awful American health care is, and the extreme shortage of doctors and care professionals, it took MONTHS to schedule and go through all of these appointments. FINALLY in May of 2023 we got a sorta-kinda-answer from the ophthalmologist of “there’s nothing to worry about, it was probably caused by excessive stress and too much caffeine and will likely go away on its own.” Which… fair, Xmas Eve 2022 was extremely stressful and I had consumed a ton of caffeine to get through it (that’s a whole other story). But yeah until that point my partner and I got to live with the non-answer of “it could be nothing, or it could be a deadly brain tumor or cancer!!!”… for like 5 months. Wheeeee. Thankfully it eventually faded, but it took almost the entire year 2023 until it was undetectable.
THIS time round with my little vision apparition I have NOT been consuming excessive caffeine – in fact I’ve been cutting down quite a bit lately – nor have I been overly stressed out, so the ophthalmologist’s potential cause goes out the window. So why are you back, little ghost buddy? Why do you haunt me so? How long will you be sticking around this time?? What do you want from me???
So again, I’m addressing you directly internet: can you help get me to the right person to tell me what the hell is going on, what caused it, and why it’s suddenly back? Please do contact me if so. Thank you.