Bodies are kind of a scam, tbh.

I will never cease to be simultaneously baffled, amused, and horrified by the sheer number of tiny, pointless ways that the human body can go wrong.

I don’t mean cancer or anything that serious. Just tiny things, like hitting your late twenties and discovering that your brain is no longer able to regulate its own cerebrospinal fluid. Or going to sleep and waking up with a ruptured disc in your spine. Or, as I recently discovered, calmly crocheting on your couch and having part of your eyeball fall apart.

It’s fine. (Really.)
It sounds much worse than it is.
It seemed much worse than it is when it happened — a sudden flashing of light around the edges of my vision, and the appearance of a blobby, dark-bordered circle in the middle. No pain. No blindness. Not even blurriness. Just something quite a bit stranger than the usual slate of pseudotumor-related optical batshittery to which I’ve become accustomed.

It’s a posterior vitreous detachment, and it’s what happens when your ocular jellies kind of pull away from their attendant structures. The flashes of light happen because the retina has no receptors for pain, and the sagging vitreous jelly pulls on stuff it shouldn’t. The little blobby circle is a shadow cast on the retina from the detached bit.
It’s gross, it’s weird, and it’s also bizarrely… harmless?

I mean, it isn’t ideal, but it’s also something that just kind of happens to people. I’ve read that it’s more common in older people, but not exactly uncommon in younger people. My history of papilledema may make me more susceptible, since nothing inside my eye it shaped the way it ought to be anymore to begin with. It isn’t even caused by in injury, the way a detached retina can be. It’s just one of many ways your body can decide to be uncooperative.

And, as with so many other small, horrifying annoyances, there’s not really much to be done. It’s just kind of like that now and will remain so for the next few months until a) my brain retrains itself to ignore it, and/or b) the stringier bits settle to the bottom of my eye. There’s a pretty high likelihood that I’ll develop a retina tear or detachment at some point, but, until that happens… eh.

I can’t say I’m happy about it, but it could be a lot worse.

Eyes were a terrible idea.
Mortal existence is a scam.