All Aboard The Eye Floaters
Things you need to know about eye floaters.
Let’s put aside social media-induced FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and relax, calm down for a while. Dilate all your bickering qualms, gulp them down and picture this. It’s an exhilaratingly good morning. Bright isohels colour the sky with positivity and hope. You’re lying on refreshingly cool, bristly grass in your very own garden of Eden, lazily staring at the clear sky. Rushing streams serenading beside you, singing the most soothing and delicate notes, seemingly static yet each time hitting differently. A blue hue with occasional small scattered fluffs of clouds thrown in, roaming unsullied in the vast expanse. Pinkish shades lurking in the naked peripherals usher in the horizon. Almost serving as an undercover jukebox, paralysing onlookers with some ethereal lo-fi hertz. As a projector of unconcerned birds gliding in cahoots with the placid breeze, the sky does allow castles to be built in the air, bringing out your creativity and letting it fly.
Against the blank canvas interspersed with white wisps, you suddenly notice something swimming: something grey or black. You rub your eyes, thinking that you’re just imagining things. But wait, it returns. It bounces back almost from an unseen wall when your eye stops moving and fades away just when you try focussing—like a playful spectre, haunting your vision exclusively and reappearing as soon as you shift your field of view. Wait, there are more. It looks like tiny blob-like worms have infested your eyes, disrupting your prized 20/20 vision. Their subtle silhouettes dancing in the tides of your vitreous humour (the gel-like fluid that fills the posterior part of your eyeball), teasing you to come and get them. Unprecedented string-like cobwebs appearing out of nowhere, tantalising you to figure out the mystery.
Not just saying or reading, but it’s time to experience them. Increase your screen’s brightness and get closer to it. Now, move your eyes from side to side on the screen, without blinking and without really focusing on anything in particular. There’s a slight chance that with the ideal setting, you may have observed some tiny dark specks passing by. Are they microbes with no future to care about, blithely strolling through the biome of your eye? Or are they worms or bugs of some sort?
What exactly are these untitled knobby, transparent things????
These deposits or condensations are often referred to as ‘eye floaters.’ Their scientific name is Muscae Volitantes meaning ‘Flying Flies.’ At times annoying, these floaters seem to be alive, sometimes moving and changing shapes. However, they aren’t any bugs or external objects which entered your eye, unbeknownst to you. Instead, they are intrinsic to your eyeball and aren’t really alive. These objects cast a shadow on your retina, the light-sensitive tissue at the back of your eye. They may be bits of tissue, red blood cells or clumps of protein differing in clarity and intensity. Appearing as rings, wisps, sheets, squiggles or other patterns in the central or peripheral vision, they drift along with your eye movements. Staying vague and indistinguishable most of the time, against bright uniform surfaces, they seem to lift their veil and swirl and twirl before your eyes. The consistency of the background puts a spotlight on them. This is because the brighter the light is, the more your pupil contracts as the excess light may cause damages. This forms a more concentrated spotlight than a diffuse one. Also, when floaters are located closer to the retina, the edges of their shadow become well-defined and sharper, the resulting image getting even more intensified.
Some blue light screen exhibits in museums allow us to see these shapes and forms much more clearly.
Often while studying (the syllabus content for which is ideal for ‘how to sleep’ tutorials) and stuck merrily in the four-page zone (a made-up phenomenon that occurs when a person is reading and then gets lost in thought, yet somehow reads four pages without processing anything), these floaters appear before the white pages or computer screens and entertain the reader until reality snaps back rather rudely.
What causes these eye floaters to form?
As we age, the firm gel-like vitreous (Latin for ‘glassy’) fluid begins to liquefy. It is a clear colourless fluid, 99% of which consists of water, and the rest is a mixture of collagen, proteins, salts and sugars. As it liquefies, it can contract and break up into bits and pieces. These bits and pieces encompass what is known as floaters. Most floaters are small flecks of aggregated collagen. As this jelly contracts, it starts pulling at these formed bits and clumps away from the retina.
So far, so good.
Now, these floaters are pretty adamant, and we move on to the dark side of floaters. They tug onto the retina, causing flashing lights at times, and can sometimes even tear the retina! Fluid from within the eye can get underneath that tear, causing the retina to peel off like wallpaper off the wall. Multiple floaters in the mid to posterior vitreous can cause difficulty in reading, driving, computer usage and concentration. Chronic floaters can affect occupations requiring sharp vision and can also be psychologically disturbing. They serve as painless tortures. Thus, in extreme onsets of floaters, it is advised to undertake a dilated eye exam to ensure that the retina is intact. The jelly clumping up is not always the origin of floaters. Sometimes, after retinal detachment, blood vessels might rupture, and the blood cells may cast shadows.
Some Other Causes:
Some other probable causes of eye floaters include bubbles caused by eye medications, complications from cataract surgery or inflammation at the back of the eye. However, the age-related cause of liquifying of vitreous humour is the most common cause of eye floater incidence.
What Can Be Done:
Our brain learns to ignore these floaters with time, and they go unnoticed most of the time. However, abnormally large or numerous floaters which hinder or interfere with vision may be a sign of a more severe condition, requiring immediate medical treatment. The cause for concern can be when there is a shower of specks, almost like black bugs, ants or a swarm of flies covering your vision, or you start losing your peripheral vision.
Contact an eye specialist immediately if you notice:
· Many more eye floaters than usual
· A sudden onset of new floaters
· Flashes of light in the same eye as the floaters
· Darkness on any side or sides of your vision (peripheral vision loss)
Risks:
Untreated retinal detachment can cause permanent vision loss. Eye floaters are more common in near-sighted people and also are more common as we age. In near-sighted people, the eye tends to be longer (front to back.) This may be a cause for retinal traction as things are more stretched than normal. People with diabetes or hypertension are prone to blood vessels rupturing easily, so there’s a chance that this can cause the onset of floaters in such patients.
Developments in Treatment:
Vitrectomy (removal of vitreous humour and replacing it with an appropriate salt solution), laser therapy and several other methods are currently being investigated and reviewed for effectiveness in treating serious cases of eye floaters. The risks involved in laser therapy are less than the risks of vitrectomy; however, there is a low risk of worsening floaters by fragmenting them into smaller pieces with the laser instead of vaporising them. Nevertheless, each patient reacts differently to different treatments.
Conclusion:
Considering the majorly benign cases, whether one loves watching floaters and fooling around with them or hates them to their death and views them as a nuisance, one thing is for sure — that floaters serve as a distraction from our busy lives at least to some extent. Making us halt and ponder, forgetting our daily rut for a while—a recreational transformation from impassive robots to curious homo sapiens sapiens.
