There is something wrong with my eyes, something that has baffled all the doctors I have seen so far.
About a year ago, a few bright, shiny, irregularly-shaped patches of light appeared, stayed at the same spot for several minutes, and slowly faded away. Each patch of light left a ‘shadow’ – a gray / ash-colored area of strongly reduced vision that has not recovered to this day. In essence, I have little or no vision in those patches. Fortunately, those patches were not central but slightly displaced about the center; in effect a cluster of these gray areas around the center.
It is difficult to say if there is no vision at all, since they are not central and fairly small. I feel the brain has learned to compensate; I notice these areas less than before, but they are very much there.
My doctors did all they could, including check for retinopathy, maculopathy, blood vessel disorders… all negative. The physical eye machinery is perfectly healthy, they say. Optic stroke? Optic nerve cell death / swelling? Apparently all negative. Something going on in the brain? They don’t know and cant tell.
(As I write this, another bright patch appeared and disappeared in under a minute, but seems to have left no “shadow” this time.)
I am baffled and so are my doctors.
Any ideas? I am of course not looking for a diagnosis, just pointers to what the condition might be. And maybe which medical centers might have expertise with such a condition. Apparently this is not commonplace and there are few options where I live.
If there’s nothing wrong with the eye itself, maybe it’s an ocular migraine? I can’t read or drive when I have them because the vision in my right eye is so distorted.
Have they checked behind the eyes on the optic nerves? For about three years I had a blind spot in the middle of my left eye. I couldn’t notice it unless I closed my right eye. I went to one eye doctor and he said it was scaring. I kept going back to him once a year to see how the scaring was doing. It wasn’t until I went to have my glasses looked at and I complained about not being able to see in my peripheral vision at all I knew something was up.
I have a tumor on the pituitary glad that was pressing on the optic nerves and causing problems. Problems which included seeing double with one eye closed, seeing double at certain distances, like driving, and some other problems.
My condition just made my doctors look at me funny until I got to a third one who knew what was up.
I don’t know how old you are, but I was in my later 30s when this was happening and I had a lot going on. I felt tired all the time and I thought it was due to stress of divorce and young kids. Turns out it was because of the tumor, but it grew so slow that I never noticed the effects. It might be something to look into.
The fact that the “shadows” have remained permanently at the same place in the visual field certainly strongly suggests that this is in the retina rather than the brain or optic nerve. Very bright lights focused on a small region of the retina commonly cause scotoma like this, by burning out the receptor cells in a small retinal area. They don’t grow back, but, as you have observed, if they are not right in central vision, small retinal scotoma do not actually impair one’s visual abilities very much for most practical purposes, and (like “floaters” within the eyeball) the brain learns to ignore them most of the time.
It is possible to get scotoma from brain damage too, but, paradoxically, the effects tend to be both wore and, in a sense, less noticeable. People with damage to some limited part of their primary visual cortex will be blind (although perhaps “blindsighted”) in part of their visual field, but, although they will no doubt be aware that they have serious visual problems, they will not be aware of the scotoma as a dark area of the visual field the way that people with retinal scotoma are. It would be experienced more like the area behind your head, which you can’t see, but does not appear to be dark either: it is just not visually present. Also, I think cortical scotoma typically affect a much larger region of the visual field than the small “shadows” that the OP describes.
What is odd is that these seem to have happened spontaneously rather than through looking at bright lights. I would guess that the flashes of light originally seen arose from the receptor cells dieing, but I have no idea what might have killed them. I suppose the most likely guess would be some sort of problem with the blood circulation in the retina, but who can say?
The doctors you have seen would surely know all this (and perhaps more about the cause than I can guess at by the given account). I suspect their bafflement is not so much about what the immediate cause of the symptom is (dead receptor cells in the retina) but about what to do about it, and perhaps what originally caused it. If they do not understand the latter, they probably also cannot tell if the problem is likely to recur, or get worse. There is really no cure (certainly not one that would not be hugely worse than the disease, in this case) for retinal damage, but then again, if it does not recur of get worse, spreading to much larger areas of the retina, which may well never happen, then it is really not that bad of a problem.
Floaters and flashes are very common in older people. I get them. If they were what the OP is suffering from I am pretty sure all the eye doctors hniyer has seen would not be “baffled” by his (or her) condition.
I am familiar with floaters and the occasional flashes, too. These are harmless and go away on their own. Almost the entire population gets them; they are unremarkable.
I think I have described pretty well what’s happening to me. One thing: I was deficient in Vitamin B6 and B12 at that time (since then loaded up on B supplements). Could that have contributed in some way?
I am reanimating this old thread to post additional new information and ask dopers again for their opinion.
One of the specialists I saw last week suggested I get done a VEP and VPG test. The tests results mentioned “reduced cone conduction velocities” and possible “cone dystrophy”.
The specialist in question brushed aside the finding of “reduced cone conduction” and instead arrived at a diagnosis of macular degeneration. This does not sound right to me, both because I am in my late 30s (too early for age-related macular degenration), and my symptoms in the OP do not seem to match what MD would bring.