What is happening to my eye?

I wear glasses. I’m myopic, with a prescription of -4.75 diopters in my left eye (big fuzzy blur) and -2.00 in my right eye (not so bad). My right eye also has a little astigmatism. My prescription has been fairly stable for years.

About six months ago I noticed something odd - point objects such as small bright lights were growing “tails” when looked at with my right eye. A period looked like a comma. This got rapidly worse.

I took it to my optician who said that my prescription had changed quite rapidly, with a lot more astigmatism. He also said that my eye showed traces of surface damage as if I’d been wearing contacts for too long, but it wasn’t really significant. I hadn’t worn contacts for weeks anyway. Since this was strange, he asked me to come back for a follow-up in two weeks.

At the follow-up, my prescription had changed again. The axis of my astimatism had altered. Baffled, he decided it was time for the eye hospital. The advantage of the British NHS is that this is free. The disadvantage is that I have to wait until June of next year unless the condition starts to give me serious problems.

I’ve been living with this for a few months. It doesn’t impair me, my left eye works fine with glasses. Didn’t seem to be getting any better or worse. It was annoying though, since I depend on my right eye to see without glasses.

This morning, my right eye was itchy. I rubbed it which made it worse - it felt that there was something stuck in there. I held my eyelid away from my eye and rolled it around. That fixed it.

Then I noticed that I could read my clock across the room without glasses for the first time in months. My right eye is a lot better. In fact, I can see better through my right eye without my glasses that with them. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s improved.

Any idea what’s going on? My optician said that they occasionally see strange problems which go away of their own accord. How does this happen?

In the meantime I’m taking the right lens out of my glasses, which is going to look freaky…

Do you wear disposeable contact lenses? If so, have you always inspected them after each and every last wearing prior to tossing them out?

You may see what I’m getting at but I’ll elaborate. I have in the past torn a contact lens upon removing it. The chunk that was torn off rolled behind my eye where I could not get to it and caused severe irritation for the two weeks it was in there. When I finally did manage to get it out it was a bit “crusty”.

If you have a chunk of a torn lens in your eye socket you may well experience the occasional irritation you describe as well as causing damage that your doctor speculated “looked like you had been wearing a contact lens for too long”. Also if this piece had moved to the fron and you rubbed it causing further irritation, rubbed again and the irritation stopped you may well have pushed the piece of lens out or back behind your eye.

I would peel back your eyelid and do a thorough irrigation two or three times. Even if you don’t use disposeable lenses I would do this, you could still have something in your eye.

"Do you wear disposeable contact lenses? If so, have you always inspected them after each and every last wearing prior to tossing them out?"

Yes, that’s when this problem started, and no, I’ve just thrown them away. You may have nailed this. Thanks!

Let me know if you do find out what it was. For some reason I’m curious if I really was right. If I was then I have to call my ex and tell her that hell just froze over.