The Eyes Have It

I found something new to worry about over the summer. So far the experts have no explanation.

It started when I was watching the dog out in the back yard on her bedtime duty call. It's pretty dark out there at night, in a small MN town where every yard has tall trees blocking neighbors' lights and street lights (as well as satellite TV signals) since they've grown so tall. It didn't help that the dog is mostly black. I could see her most of the way, but when she got small enough she disappeared! If I looked a bit to the side of her, I could make out where she was and what she was doing. There are some white hairs on her after all. Switching back to looking straight at her... gone!

I wouldn't have made anything of it but an interesting (to me) footnote, except for the fact there is a history of macular degeneration in the family. I started to wonder, since this was limited to my very central vision and only when it's very dark, does it start by affecting the rods in the eyes? Could it be possible that we live in such a light polluted world nowdays that people just haven't had an actual chance to notice? It never gets that dark here in my well lit Arizona suburb, unlike the Minnesota back yard where at night all color is erased and nothing exists except black and grey, with stars actually sprinkling the sky again. It takes that deep a dark for that tiny bit of central vision to go completely black.

I had an eye doctor appointment coming up in October, so made a mental note to discuss it with him. While I waited, I tried to "make" it happen again in AZ, but it never did. There was always still color, even inside with doors and windows as blocked as they get. I couldn't reproduce the effect. While musing over it back in Minnesota, in the bedroom it got dark enough that I could stare at the wall at night after having had my eyes closed for several minutes, and for ten or fifteen seconds that black spot would come back. I'd do it one eye at a time, and the left eye made it slightly more distinct than the right eye. With slightly lighter walls than the depths of the back yard, I could determine the black spot was the shape of a fat football, just a hair off of being aligned to my head's horizontal axis, angled just a bit higher on the left. Curiouser and curiouser. That was true for both eyes. With my pillow being about seven or eight feet from the wall, the spot was about the size of a fat football as well as its shape.

Come appointment time, my regular eye doc had no answers. They did the eyedrops to expand my pupils, shined lights, took pictures, had me look at graphs with lots of tiny squares in a grid to see if any of the lines wiggled. Nothing. My eyes are fine except for a small nevis, although he's suggesting my right eye could qualify for cataract surgery any time now. (Since I see fine by my standards with glasses, no thanks. Not yet.) 

Just to be sure, he sent me to a retina specialist. "See them within a week." When I questioned the speed, I was reassured that a real emergency like a detached retina would have me over there that same day! That exam was last week, and much like the other one except with one additional machine and more lights to follow plus brighter flashing lights for their pictures.

The conversation with this doc was... reassuring, I guess. At least as far as anything they can see, my eyes are perfect. But he had no explanation, had never herd such a thing described, and (therefore) found it nothing to be concerned about. So I walked out of there... reassured, I guess. But I promise you, with or without the dog to take out at night, next year back in that dark bedroom, I'll be doing the black football hunt again. Are they still there? Bigger? Blacker? Or gone, just a figment of an aging memory, a mystery never to be solved?