PVD II

      Posterior vitreous detachment: the glob of vitreous humor that fills your eyeball contracts and detaches from the back of the eye.  It happened to my left eye in November of 2015.  It happened to my right eye last week, only uglier: late Wednesday night, a huge floater suddenly showed up my right eye, floating and flapping around as I scanned lines of text, blocking them.  It's a kind of smiley-shape with a dot just off one end, very shaggy.  Trying to track it got me white flashes at the periphery of my vision, which got me on the phone to my eye doctor the next morning.  They scheduled me for an appointment the next day.

      The eye doctor took some long looks at both eyes.  He wasn't happy, and told me I was going to see a specialist, immediately -- "If you have someone to drive you."

      "Why's that?"

      "If they need to put you under for surgery," he said.

      He was concerned the retina of my right eye might be torn.

      That was sobering enough that I almost wished I had been drinking.  I texted Tam to meet me at home, put on two sets of sunglasses (the doctor had dilated my eyes a lot) and drove home, where I handed over the keys to Tam and we set out for the eye surgeon, five miles away.

      That office was devastatingly efficient.  An assistant was calling my name before I had finished checking in.  He did a quick assessment, dilated my eyes even more, numbed them a little and handed me over to the specialist M.D..

      Dr. Moorthy is one of those people--  Did you ever meet a subject-matter expert who was so calmly confident that it was reassuring at first sight?  He was about three times as much that as I have encountered, and yet not at all overbearing.  Just entirely in control of the situation.  That was good, because I was starting to panic.  It had been building since hearing "...someone to drive you."  All that drained away: if something was wrong, this guy was going to fix it, all in a day's work.

      He looked more closely at my eyes than they have ever been looked at -- bright lights, lenses, a specialized camera.  The conclusion is that it's a huge floater (and a flock of smaller ones) as a result of PVD, and I will need to look for any signs of retina problems ("clouds" in my eye that don't move, loss of peripheral vision and so on) for the next several weeks.  He'll check again in four weeks and again a month later.

      This eventually happens to everyone.  Being nearsighted and female means it is most probably going to be sooner rather than later.

      That darned floater is still in my eye.  It's a little smaller and less shaggy, but it keeps flipping around, usually ending up right at the center of my eye.  It's like trying to read through decorative iron scrollwork.  The doctor tells me it will eventually subside.  I'm looking forward to that.