What we see plays an important role in our lives. Even for most people, vision is the number one of the five senses they don’t want to lose. True, what we see can influence the decision we make every day. For example, if we see that the weather outside is not too nice, we wear clothes to resist the cold and not get soaked in the rain. We also change to thin and breathable clothes if we see that the sun is shining high up in the sky. But there is one thing we normally don’t notice, but subconsciously know about, that can go wrong. We call them the floaters—or eye floaters as they say.
Basically, these are those wriggly, moving, worm-like stuff we sometimes notice in our vision. Sometimes they are colored white, sometimes gray, and some can even be black. It all depends. But as we all notice, they just float and drift away in our field of vision no matter how they may look like. As a kid, we have even tried to play with those stuff by forcing ourselves to notice those and chase where they’re going. Eye floaters normally just drift away as they pass by our vision so we often don’t think we need eye care companies like eye doctor in Lake Worth Fl
We see all these things because of the presence of the vitreous humor inside our eyes. This is the gel-like substance that’s in every human’s eye. This substance is mostly made up of water and is sticky. However, as we age, this substance tends to be more watery or less sticky than what it’s supposed to. Since the vitreous humor is attached to the retina and tends to shrink as we age, small fibers can also be detached while it’s shrinking and form small clumps or masses of fibers that we call as eye floaters. The shadows that these clumps or masses form is what we see in our vision that comes in different forms. Normally, we only ignore floaters even though we notice them when looking at empty or blank areas such as when we close our eyes or watch the sky. All humans experience this kind of phenomenon. But as we age and as more and more vitreous gel becomes watery, floaters can be more noticeable.
Although we just mentioned that eye floaters are only normal and there’s nothing to be afraid of when noticing them, there may be times when you have to be alarmed. Eye floaters can sometimes become suddenly noticeable, or bothersome, and distracting to the vision. When this happens, this isn’t normal anymore and this is usually one of the signs of retinal detachment.
Retinal detachment occurs when the vitreous gel tears the retina as it tries to pull away from it. Under normal circumstances, the shrinking of the vitreous humor happens without any problem, but when it results in retinal tears, there is a sudden increase in eye floaters. A retinal tear or retinal detachment is a very serious case and can lead to blindness when left untreated. Along with it, there can also be inflammation, infection, trauma to the eyes, or if you’ve had eye surgery before, there may be something wrong in the surgical site like bleeding. As we don’t want any of these to happen, it is always best to seek the help of an eye doctor right away.