FLOATERS

No, not those blown up to keep afloat in water. I'm talking to those lovely little bits of flotsam and jetsom that travel in your eyeball and have you thinking there are bugs in front of your eyes. There have been many with me for years now and my eye doctor says they do no harm. (He clearly doesn't mind reading a book slapping at imaginary bugs on the page). At times it seems I an looking at the universe with planets orbiting through my vision field.

Floaters are condensations of cells in the vitreous or gel part of the eye. Floaters can look like a number of things including dots, spots, dots with arms, spiders, clumps of dots or strings. Sometimes they settle down at the bottom and are less irritating.

They increased in number after I had my lens replacements to rid me of cataracts. Then increased when the back of the lenses grew covers of epithelial cells which were then lasered to get rid of the tissue which decided to grow there to make my vision a permanent twilight. The laser surgery is completely painless and brief, and I no longer need a thousand watt bulb to read food labels.

It is not clear to me why they are called floaters and not sinkers, since they are supposed to eventually fall to the bottom of the eyeball. Recently I developed a new shape and color. Apparently they haven't figured a way to get rid of them without taking your eyeball out, so, choosing the lesser of two evils I have begun to accept them and some of them have distinctive shapes and names. There is a black one that looks just my computer cursor, only thinner. I've nicknamed it Excalibur because I'm unable to pull him out of my eyeball. Sometimes I have the fantasy that they will grow and split like amoeba cells and I'll have to go through the rest of my life as though I am seeing the universe through a microscope slide with planets orbiting one another rapidly while the space junk rolls around.

Indeed, people with floaters can never be bored...boring, perhaps, but bored....NEVAH!