I spent the last 6 months worrying over my eye floaters. There were new ones I had never noticed before - the day I noticed it, I went from thinking that I had become psychotic to thinking I was going blind. I was so afraid that it was a sign of some terrible thing that I actually actively avoided going to the doctor for fear of being told I was going blind. I became totally obsessed with it until finally I made an appointment with an ophthalmologist. Of course, I knew that floaters can be, and usually are totally normal, but that thought wasn't really stopping me from worrying.
The doctor checked my eye out and couldn't even see the structures with the microscope, indicating that what I perceived as rather large is in fact minutely tiny.
Basically, there is stuff floating around in the jelly of your eyeball; when you're looking at bright white backgrounds, the floaters appear as shadows as cast against your retina. Because you're worried about it, you're focusing on these floaters and in turn perceiving them much more often and magnified than what would be normal. Chances are that if you relax about it, you'll stop seeing them as often. Our brain is pretty clever at learning to ignore what is not important for our perception. Projecting worry and fear onto the floaters however sends the message that they are dangerous and in turn you notice them much more frequently.
Maybe that doesn't help you right now, but I can tell you I know how crazy it can make you go because you can't stop noticing them, and every time you do, you remember your worries. And I think that because we perceive visually constantly, it just makes it that much more of a difficult anxiety.
But since I'm more relaxed about it, I've hardly noticed them anymore. There is hope ;-)
As for the tingling you're pairing it up with: I'm no doctor, but I can only say that when I start to obsess with a particular disease I think I might have, I place way too much emphasis on otherwise "normal" physical sensations and start to link them with the disease I'm worried about. At some point I had kind of stuffy sinuses after a cold, and rather than seeing it as that, I payed way too much attention on the tingly headache feeling it was giving me, and noticing it particularly around my left eye, the one with the floaters. I thought this was a sign for a brain tumor or some kind of eye condition. I don't think that you're imagining the tingling but maybe your perception is exaggerating it because of your fear of neurological disease.
I hope you find some peace and relax a bit about it. It might sound like a silly way of dealing with it, but when I was going through it, I started to focus on a body part I was not worried about to "explore" the physical sensations there, which would not only distract me, but make me see that when I concentrated on it, I could notice things everywhere - it's just our body being alive.
Relax and good luck.
PS: Also, apparently floaters disappear with time. Not only can they fade (if they are made up of blood cells) but the crap floating in a younger, firmer eye starts to sink to the bottom of the eyeball when the jelly liquifies over time. That's what the ophthalmologist told me anyway.
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Topic: Eye Floaters....neurological problem? (Read 701 times)
April 08, 2008, 10:52:20 PM
