I read with interest your struggles with floaters. I myself have struggled with these pearly clumps for nearly four years. My younger brother died in a tragic accident and I suffered from a deep and severe grief reaction. The first floater appeared four months into my ordeal and I blamed it on the Xanax I was taking for horrendous panic attacks. Subsequently I started to notice that the other eye was going...I took more Xanax to try not to see them. As the depression lifted, the floaters became a new source for depression and anxiety. My vision strangely has become clearer and sharper than ever but I can't enjoy a clear day or a seascape because the segmented threads just flit about and hover and swish etc, I am so depressed by this that I have become dependent on Valium. I hardly go out in the daylight and i wait for sunset at which time they vanish. The only thing that seemed to help was long periods of bedrest and relaxation. The long rectangular strand has now collapsed into a dense clump and i imagine all sorts of terrifying diseases that are waiting to blind or kill me. I have tried several herbal cures but nothing has worked. Magnesium supplements did work but when I went to a cemetery recently, the white marble walls of a mausoleum were awash in dancing strands. I would have liked to crawl into a grave. The floaters seem to be getting paler but their locations and shapes remain a constant problem. Also did you ever notice that one floater can cast two different shadows on the retina...for example in my left eye, the floter with the tail that hovers somewhere in the middle also can be seen dashing back and forth in the top of my visual field. I realize that sunlight from in front or above casts one shadow and hence a floater and reflected light from a sidewalk or water sends a shadow in another direction. Try this...get a floater in your visual field and squint and you will see it's definition much clearer...or look into a microscope at a slide with nothing on it. If you can hold the microscope in the air looking up through the eyepiece you will see your floaters as they actually appear...it's amazing. I am very, very upset about this and when I asked a very prominent ophthamologist why I suffered so much he said... "luck of the draw"
(Name withheld)
