Floaters after cataract surgery ?

Hi, I've had floaters following an eye trauma; a few years later, I suffered a retinal detachment that was successfully fixed by the injection of a gas bubble into my eyeball to get the retina back in place, followed by laser zapping a few days later. It is amazing what medicine can sometimes accomplish--not too many decades ago, "monocular blindness" was a much more likely fate. I wrote about the whole thing here: www.menshealth.com/.../seeing-future A couple notes: Virtually everybody on earth develops floaters with age. They can be extremely annoying, especially for people (like me) who tend towards obsessiveness. That said, researchers believe that the human brain does eventually learn to ignore the majority of them. Be patient--it may take quite a while, but eventually they will stop bugging you so much. Other things that can help are: Realize that after you've been poked or otherwise traumatized in your eye, it can unleash a bunch of detritus, including red blood cells if the injury is severe. Like a snowshaker globe, this stuff does tend to float around pretty frantically for a while, but over time, it settles down and is less noticeable. Floaters are most noticeable in bright light. After my eye-poking pit bull episode (see my article), there was such a storm of little black dots against the cloudless summer sky that I thought it was a distant flock of crows (or closer swarm of gnats.) This DID get better over the course of many months, but I found that it really helped to wear dark sun glasses to reduce the contrast. Also, if a particularly obnoxious goopy string is hovering right in the center of your visual field and you are trying to, say, read, swivel your eyeball around in its socket and you can often get the floater to move away at least enough so that it makes it easier to read. So, to summarize: Take solace in the fact that floater misery has plenty of company: everyone gets these eventually Be patient and allow your brain time to learn to filter them out and stop paying as much attention Wear sun glasses and roll your eyeballs as needed! Don't worry that swimming will make the problem worse--unrelated physiologically. If anything, the stress reduction of swimming might expedite the brain adaptation and floater-ignoring business! Good luck!

Hi, I've had floaters following an eye trauma; a few years later, I suffered a retinal detachment that was successfully fixed by the injection of a gas bubble into my eyeball to get the retina back in place, followed by laser zapping a few days later. It is amazing what medicine can sometimes accomplish--not too many decades ago, "monocular blindness" was a much more likely fate. I wrote about the whole thing here: www.menshealth.com/.../seeing-future A couple notes: Virtually everybody on earth develops floaters with age. They can be extremely annoying, especially for people (like me) who tend towards obsessiveness. That said, researchers believe that the human brain does eventually learn to ignore the majority of them. Be patient--it may take quite a while, but eventually they will stop bugging you so much. Other things that can help are: Realize that after you've been poked or otherwise traumatized in your eye, it can unleash a bunch of detritus, including red blood cells if the injury is severe. Like a snowshaker globe, this stuff does tend to float around pretty frantically for a while, but over time, it settles down and is less noticeable. Floaters are most noticeable in bright light. After my eye-poking pit bull episode (see my article), there was such a storm of little black dots against the cloudless summer sky that I thought it was a distant flock of crows (or closer swarm of gnats.) This DID get better over the course of many months, but I found that it really helped to wear dark sun glasses to reduce the contrast. Also, if a particularly obnoxious goopy string is hovering right in the center of your visual field and you are trying to, say, read, swivel your eyeball around in its socket and you can often get the floater to move away at least enough so that it makes it easier to read. So, to summarize: Take solace in the fact that floater misery has plenty of company: everyone gets these eventually Be patient and allow your brain time to learn to filter them out and stop paying as much attention Wear sun glasses and roll your eyeballs as needed! Don't worry that swimming will make the problem worse--unrelated physiologically. If anything, the stress reduction of swimming might expedite the brain adaptation and floater-ignoring business! Good luck!