It was me this week. I had a major melt down, loads of yelling, shouting and complaining about all my setbacks in work, my long-term financial situation, my relationship with my mother, my sisters, my landlady. You name it, I yelled about it. The only people I spared were my son (who suffers from psychosis) and my OH (who is super supportive, but HATES listening to me when I go off on one). What triggered it was that I had vision problems. Black blobs floating in front of my eyes. I have had diabetes since childhood and doctors have been threatening me with blindness all that time. I panicked. I panicked. I panicked. I looked it up on the internet. Everything said that my retina in my right eye was detaching. I could hardly even read or take in what I was reading. I couldn’t breathe. I thought, “What will I do? Without my income, we can’t manage. I have no pension. few savings. How will we live? How can we go on helping my son?” etc, etc, etc.
I went to the hospital three times. I had to pay for this because my work permit is still being processed so my health insurance is not current.
The doctor examined my eyes each time and told me he could find “nothing pathological”. I went to the diabetic doctor, who called the eye doctor. The eye doc told the diabetic doc that my eyes were “better than a non-diabetic’s eyes”. But I still had great big blobs in the vision of my right eye. One of them was like having a big black spider splatted on my glasses, except it was the lens of my eye. Plus, there were a couple of black blobs. It was a terrible week. I didn’t know how to cope. I was seeing this black stuff but the doctors were saying everything is fine.
After a week, the spider had disappeared. At this point I was able to accept that it was NOT retinopathy, and maybe, just maybe, it had nothing to do with my diabetes (always my default position). Now I just have one very annoying blob, and I am hoping it will go away.
So apparently, in your fifties it is common to get “floaters”. But this was like having a flotilla of dinghies in my eye.
And what has wrecked me is that i know that when i went off on one, I sounded really, really paranoid! Really, my metal health was definitely questionable. So, on top of everything else I started to think I must be mentally ill too with anosognosia. Is there something nobody is telling me?
I give up looking anything up on the internet!
