There is no end of things that can deteriorate in your body when you get older. So this series is about my own aging orifices with links to websites that might be helpful to you as you get older.
I don’t remember when the floaters began, but once started, they became a pain-in-the-neck. Don’t get me wrong. There is no physical pain associated with floaters. They are just little specks inside your eye that float in and out of your visual field. They are often more prevalent in one eye than the other. Some of mine are so big that they actually occlude small areas of the screen of my computer as I write to you.
If I try to look at the biggest floater, it jumps away like it’s afraid I might recognize it and hovers just slightly out of range of vision. Occasionally, but not often, one floats right into my field of vision and is so clear that I feel like I can almost touch it, but it scurries away as soon as I try to focus on it. Tricky little buggers.
Floaters come with aging. The vitreous gel-like fluid inside your eyes begins to shrink and produce small particles that float around in the fluid. Sometimes they’ll settle toward the bottom of your eyes, and if you are lucky, you won’t see them anymore.
With me, I see my floaters almost all the time, and mostly I have learned to ignore them. To be absolutely sure that nothing serious is wrong, I get an eye exam with with an Ophthalmologist (a medical/surgical doctor) every year, and if my vision changes, as it just recently did, I see an Optometrist who examines my vision for changes and writes a prescription for new lenses. I walk across the hall to the Opticians who will manufacture the lenses.
At about age forty, the lens in your eyes becomes less flexible, and you are going to need glasses if you don’t already have them. At age eighty-six, I’ve changed lenses so many times that I don’t change the frames anymore. A couple of changes ago, I invested in a pair of frames that I really liked that were super expensive, and I will keep them until the day I die. Hey. Even us old guys care about how we look.
Next time, if I remember (heh-heh), I’ll tell you all about cataracts.
The vision changes have been, for me, the most frustrating and expensive part of aging, so far. I started wearing glasses in third grade and then switched to contact lenses in sixth grade and wore them happily, successfully and able to see, read and take my vision fir granted until my early 50’s. When I was going to have to wear glasses with my contacts, I gave up and started wearing bifocals in my daily life, with progressive glasses for the computer at work. My prescription changes and I have to get new lenses every year or so, and I, too, have learned to keep the frames and just get new lenses. But my vision is just OK, a compromise that can be annoying. I miss that clear, sharp vision in all directions, and being able to read or use the computer easily. The floaters are just another rather amusing part of it. Oh, well…we’ll enjoy vision as the impressionists saw life! Compromise and a sense of humor…and even gratitude for what remains.
Thanks for sharing this! I also had cataracts and wrote a post about the experience. Looking forward to reading yours.