Living with Floaters

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There seems to be a distinct lack of good information out there, to help floater sufferers live with their floaters. If you go to a professional optician or doctor, the most advice you're likely to get is "you'll get used to them" or "your brain will adapt". But this is insufficient help for someone who has, in the course of a few days, gone from having crystal clear, clean, normal vision, to dirty, noisy vision full of currents of microscopic shapes. The so-called professionals' lack of concern and understanding can be very frustrating, as they brush off the reality of viewing the World through a mess of blobs, threads and dots, as being simply "harmless". Physically they're harmless, yes, but psychologically they can destroy you and ruin your life. So, for that reason, I decided to write this Living With Floaters article, to give fellow sufferers some (hopefully) useful tips and advice.

Face your fears head on. Automatically, the two things you'll want to avoid are bright light, and plain expanses. Continually avoiding them can actually create a phobia, whereby you fear going outside, or into bright interiors. Getting floaters isn't avoidable, but making yourself photophobic is. So really, the best thing you can do is to face your fears. Force yourself to go out into the sun, knowing that, if you can deal with the worst conditions, everything else will be easier. If you're psychologically strong enough to be relaxed and happy in bright sunlight, in a white room, you're off to a great start.

Focus on the positive. Focus on everything that you can still see, rather than focusing on the floaters. Think about the colours, the detail and the movement in the distance, not the moving threads in the foreground. Think about the 95% good, versus the 5% bad. 95% is much nearer to 100% than 5% is, so be grateful that you're much nearer to being fully sighted, than being blind.

Try adapting to a visual condition worse than floaters. For example, try living your life for a few hours with your eyes closed and notice all the things you can't do. Or if you wear glasses, try not wearing them for a while and notice how much worse your vision could be. Afterwards, when you go back to your normal vision with floaters, you might appreciate it more. It's often hard to appreciate what you do have, until you don't have it. So enjoy and appreciate everything that you have today, because you might lose it tomorrow!

Declare war on floaters. Are you going to let microscopic dirt ruin your entire life? Are you going to let these tiny imperfections bring down your entire body, wasting all that's right with you? Are you going to let this insignificant crap run your life for you, and influence your decisions? Are you going to waste an entire summer sat indoors, just because of these tiny little things? The answer is NO. You are a million times more important and stronger than these microscopic fibres. You're the one in charge, not them.

Try not to follow your floaters with your eyes. Yes, it's very difficult not to look at them, but when you follow them with your eyes, all you're doing is keeping them in the centre of your vision. And if you keep aligning them in the centre of your vision, they'll always appear to be right in front of you. So what you should do is fixate on a point of interest, and just let the floaters rush past you. Even if you feel tempted to divert your gaze, don't. If you make an effort to keep your attention on real objects, and not on your floaters, you won't constantly notice them.

Try not to move your eyes too much. That doesn't mean you shouldn't move your eyes at all, but if you wish to see your floaters less, moving your eyes in a slower, more relaxed way will help. You see, every time you move your eyes you're agitating your floaters and setting them in motion, much like shaking a snow globe. So the less you move your eyes, the less your floaters will move, and the less visible they'll be. If you can bring your floaters to a complete stop, you'll notice that they temporarily vanish! To demonstrate this, you need to lie on your back and balance your floaters perfectly in place. After a second or two they will disappear, only to reappear as soon as your move your eyes again!

Take more photos and video. Your vision today might have floaters in it, but all of your memories will be floater free. So grab your digital camera and start making memories; floater free memories. If you go on holiday, your floaters will be there temporarily with you, but not in the photos and video you bring back and share with others. Your camera is the closest anyone will ever get to seeing the World through your eyes. So just be grateful that your camera sees things better than you do, and don't tell anyone!

Ask someone else to drive. Floaters may be physically "harmless", but not if they're the cause of a car accident. A serious danger with floaters is that they desensitize you to movement, particularly in your peripheral vision. But you have to become desensitized to movement. If you didn't, you'd be continually noticing and reacting to your floaters, every second of the day, which would drive you mad. So, you learn not to react to movement. The danger of this is you don't pay as much attention to things out of the corner of your eye. If you notice movement, you ignore it. Most of the time that movement is a floater, but it could also be a person, a child, a motorbike, a car! So, as you can imagine, someone with "harmless" floaters could quite easily be involved in, or the cause of, a serious car accident. So my advice is, if someone else can drive instead of you, ask him or her to, in the interests of safety.

Dim your computer monitor. Your floaters will often look worse when you're using a computer. This is because most computer displays are bright, large, and typically show large areas of solid white. It's these large areas of white that will you give you the most trouble. So try decreasing the brightness, or lowering the backlight, of your computer display. The less light shining off your display and into your eyes, the fainter your floaters will appear. Adjust your display, making it dimmer and dimmer, until you reach a point where you feel most comfortable. If you're using an Apple Mac computer, try downloading the free Shades application by Charcoal Design, which will allow you to dim your display all the way down to black! Or, use the Apple Universal Access feature, which will allow you to invert the screen to White on Black (more information here).

Consider an alternative to white walls! White walls look modern and luxurious in the home, but they're the brightest, cleanest, worst colour you could choose for a floater sufferer to live in. So, either re-paint your walls in deep dark colours, or put up some wallpaper with a high contrast pattern. If re-decorating isn't an option, try putting up some picture frames, to give you some points to focus on, against those large expanses of white. Detail and complexity are your friends; minimalism and plainness are your enemies.

Try tinting your windows. No one really wants to have his or her curtains drawn all day long, unable to look outside. So buy some tinted window film, and apply it to your windows. That way you'll be able to look outside, without having full, unfiltered daylight shining into your eyes. And by actually being able to see the World outside, rather than having it hidden, you might find yourself more tempted to go out into it.

Wear sunglasses. Sunglasses or "shades" reduce the amount of light getting into your eyes, which reduces the strength of the shadows cast by your floaters on your retina, making your floaters appear fainter. Filter category 3 lenses are the darkest typically found in shops, but category 4 lenses are even darker, allowing just 3-8% of visible light through. If you also want to wear sunglasses when it's cloudy, but feel self-conscious about doing so, there's actually a product that can help. A British company called Cantor & Nissel manufacturer contact lenses with tinted pupils, enabling you to darken your vision, without anyone else knowing!

Go out on sunny days and keep moving. Strange as it may sound, being stuck indoors in a sunny room can actually seem worse than being outdoors in the sunlight. Modern interiors are typically plain, clean, with lots of blank white surfaces that show up floaters. Plus, if you're just sitting still and not moving, the floaters inside your eyes will be the only thing in motion, and will be much more noticeable. In a lot of outdoor environments however, such as cities, parks, forests, there is so much detail, so much to take in, and so much going on that your floaters will be much harder to notice. Plus, if you keep walking and moving, the movement inside your own eyes will seem less significant compared to the constantly changing World around you.