My Story: When I Suffered a Detached Retina With an Optic Nerve Coloboma

My whole life I’ve had terrible vision in my right eye. Terrible. No peripheral vision, and only the most low functioning of vision — like looking through a bad static image. I used the eye so little that sometimes I found myself closing my right eyelid without even thinking about it. I didn’t pay much attention to the eye unless I closed my left (good) eye and really focused on it.

And then suddenly terrible vision was no vision.

I couldn’t tell you exactly when it happened. (The ophthalmologist certainly wanted to know.) I know it happened between an October annual visit and sometime in June of the following year. I only realized it for sure when I was out camping with a friend one evening. He was at the restroom and for some reason I got the inkling to cover my good eye and turn on the flashlight with my bad one.

I couldn’t see anything.

I went in to see the ophthalmologist a couple of days later. I’d been going in for annual visits at a well-respected eye center connected to both a hospital and a university, so they knew my eye history. A day later I was with a retina specialist at the same center, who evaluated me on what to do next.

“I don’t think you should have surgery,” he said.

He went on to explain why. The vision in my eye was so bad to begin with that the best I could hope for was perhaps going back to terrible vision in that eye. And the outcomes were low even for that. On top of that, there were risks with surgery: infection, for example.

I asked the doctor what he would do. He didn’t hesitate. “I wouldn’t have surgery. I’m happy to do it if you want me to, but I wouldn’t do it.”

In hindsight, I probably should have realized that it might end like this. When my ophthalmologist examined me a couple of years before, she’d discovered a cataract in my bad eye. She’d recommended against surgery to remove it, since the vision was so bad (ironically enough, one of the risks of cataract surgery is a detached retina). That probably should have been a sign that the medical specialists around me didn’t see that eye as essential.

That makes me a little different than some people who have detached retinas and then operate to try and save the vision. In my case, the vision had been bad my whole life — so bad I barely noticed it was gone — that the benefits to surgery were very few and the risks greater.

I had a few friends of mine who had a hard time understanding that, but I explained that only I could fully appreciate how bad the vision was in that eye, and that I trusted the specialists I’d seen.

Psychologically, though, it was still a little sad. Going to bed that evening, I had to come to grips with the finality of it. I’ve given up that eye, poor as it was, and I wasn’t going to get it back.

From a practical perspective, though, not much has really changed.