It all changes in the blink of an eye

 Imagine if you will - getting on your trainer, spin bike, treadmill or other piece of workout equipment. You've been having weird issues with your eye - including a strange glare on lights, intermittent double vision when you bend over and generally just sensing that something is off. You've been dealing with it for about four weeks now, but it's not getting any better. The appointment with the eye doctor is made for the next day- but no one seems to think it's serious. After all, there's no new floaters, no flashing lights in your eye and no spots where the vision is gone. You can see just fine - when you aren't having the double vision - it's just that something is off but you don't know what. But it's time for a workout - time to put all the wonky vision issues behind you and just focus on the movement and activity.

And then... Workout done, you bend over to take off your shoes. That double vision, unfocused vision comes back, like a door falling open. Or a lens falling out of place. No big deal, right - it's always come right back when you stand you. Except this time, when you stand up, fully expecting to be able to see out of that eye nothing changes. Nothing. The vision we take for granted is gone. Sure, there's all the shapes and you can "see" everything, but nothing is in focus. It's like looking through a camera lens but without focusing for the picture. Is now the time to panic? What just happened? As you move your head around, there's brief moments where everything is in focus again. But just as fleeting as the moments arrive they are gone. The whole world is off kilter and out of focus in that eye.

You get a hold of one of the eye doctors - the retina specialist who also happens to specialize in complex lens issues. By this point, it's clear what happened. Laying on the couch, you can see the lens floating around your eye, flitting in and out of your visual field. Discussing things with the retina doctor makes you feel a little better. There's no new signs of another retina detachment so your vision will be fine. There's just one complication. The pseudophakia lens that was placed in your eye back in 2007 has dislocated. There's nothing that you could have done to stop this from happening. No surgeries, no magic drugs to take. Once the process was in place, eventually it would happen. It's a very rare complication of cataract surgery - one that becomes more common the longer the artificial lens has been in the eye (going from something like .5% at five years to 5% at 10 years...)  The wonky vision, the strange glare and double vision at times were all signs that the lens was not staying in place. For some reason, the bending over when you took your shoes off was the final straw that broke the rest of the zonuals holding the lens in place. No need for an urgent visit - just stay with the appointment you already have scheduled for tomorrow. They will figure out how to deal with the loss of visual acuity at then. 

This is exactly what happened to me on November 23, 2021. 

I got on my trainer after work, had a solid workout but when I bent over to take off my cycling shoes my whole world changed. I suddenly found myself aphakic - without a lens. The eye doctor's appointment became trying to figure out how bad things really were in my eye and to see if they would be able to correct it with a contact. I spent two hours at the office between the two doctors, getting photos taken, the doctor closely examining my eyes, then having a refraction done to determine a baseline prescription for a contact for my right eye. There's a whole specialty contact market for aphakic eyes - the question now becomes if I can tolerate wearing a contact to replace the lens inside my eye. Given that my appointment was the day before Thanksgiving, the other question is how long will it take to get the first trial contact in? Until then, I'm literally half blind.

I once jokingly asked an eye doctor if they would write a journal article about my eyes - now I don't think it's as much of a joke! How many other people have had all the complications that I have had, from cataracts in my 20s to bilateral retina detachments and now this?