Blurry vision

Everyday living
1

Last weekend I had a bit of a tummy bug, with a temperature for a couple of days, during which my eyes went blurry, and haven’t recovered! I’ve had ON in the past, and its not that, and though my eyes are generally a bit troublesome, and the heat makes everything flare up temporarily, I only wear glasses for reading normally.

This is odd though. Its like when you relax your eyes and they go soft focus, I just can’t get them back! I’ve also got a kind of mini hug going on, twitching, jumping shooting pains in left back/ribs/shoulder and under left breast, so wondering if the bug has triggered something off, and it’ll settle, or whether to see an optician?

Any advice please?

Thanks,

Bx

2

Hi Hunny

MS does make your vision blurry and it’s a daily change to seeing ok or soft blurry and not sharp.

I wore glasses then wasted £2k on laser with 20/20 vission which lasted 2 years until I got severly dehydrated due to pancreas deciding to pack up thanks to my immune system attacking it.

Any how eyes never recovered. Optician said that had nothing to do with it and my eye muscles are weaker and struggle to focus due to the MS.

Tonight my eyes are sharp and I can see fine to type and look around, wake up tomorrow and I will have to put glasses on to drive.

Not sure where I’m going with this story but I would mention whats happend to your neuro bod and if it don’t clear up in a week or so have a eye test as they will check for other things also.

I did look into eye excerises to improve sharpness but did not work for me.

Good luck

3

Hi B I get what you mean about soft focus. It does feel like you’re relaxed and just need to snap back but it doesn’t. It’s very weird. I’ve got yet another infection…third in three months…so feeling rough but I also know this heat and humidity really badly affect me too so a combo of both…yuck !! My MS nurse always says to give symptoms 48 hours and then call her if no better. Catherine Xx

4

I have yet to be dx, but I am getting this on and off all the time at the moment. It’s really frustrating. I went to have my eyes tested and he said, although I do need a slightly stronger prescription, this is not being caused by my eyes, so must be neurological.

It is exactly as you describe it…as if your eyes are drifting and everything goes out of focus, but you can’t get it back in. Horrible.

Am definitely going to mention it when I finally get to see a Neuro in September!

5

Thanks guys.

It’s pretty annoying I have to say! I think I’ll leave it over the weekend, and then ring the nurse if there’s no improvement.

Catherine, I’m sorry you’ve had such a rough time recently, I hope you get some relief soon, winter’s on its way!

Take care all xx

6

Hunny I have the same, where my eyes go out of focus and I can’t always get them back into focus for a few seconds.

My optician said it’s a muscle imbalance and that if it doesn’t right itself, she can put prisms into my lenses which will help. She gave me “excercises” to strengthen my eye muscles which involves bringing a pen to the tip of my nose and out again while focussing on it (basically crossing my eyes).

It hasn’t helped so I’m going to go back and get the prisms.

7

@ meme:
Prisms only fix diplopia (double vision). If your eyes are slow to change focus, this is not diplopia.

@hunny and meme both:Blurry vision that takes a few seconds to sort itself out is usually very simple in itself, but not quite so easy to fix.

To start. A slow shift from near to distance focus is mostly age related. No, I’m not asking, but somewhere between 40 and 50 would be typical. The normal fix would be bifocal lenses. (But see below)

Next comes something for your GP rather than an optometrist (that’s the person who tests your eyes). A blocked tear-duct, or otherwise inadequate lubrication for the eyeball means that a blink does not clean the surface, but just smears what is there around. If several blinks in rapid sucession remove the blurryness, this is likely the problem.

After that, comes a cataract. If its a big one, the blur will not go away. A tiny one can just make it a bit hard at times, and you might just notice a tiny blurry circle if it happens to drift into the centre of your line of sight (say when looking at a monitor, reading this).

Double vision (diplopia). this is where the two eyes are not quite co-ordinated. This can be the muscles that orient the eyeballs (think of a squint) so that the point in two slightly different directions. It can be the muscles that focus the individual lenses in each eye so that an object is aimed at different parts of each retina. It would be unusual to have both sets of muscles involved.

You can test for diplopia yourself. All you need is a high-contrast target, preferably with a 90 degree angle. You casn look for a second image (somewhat fuzzy and slightly displaced), and check by alternately looking with one eye and the other. If is is more than about 50-70 feet away, and it seems to jump about, you can rule out the muscles that turn the eyeballs in to give you a measure of depth perception from binocular vision. But, you cannot measure diplopia yourself.

Optometrists do not usually like to deal with more than mild cases of diplopia, and generally only vertical displacement. Proper diagnosis and measurement is usually done by a hospital Orthoptics Department. This can take some time (several months, even) and often involves stick-on Fresnel (prism) lenses on your normal (or plain glass) specs. The stick-on Fresnel lens is only about half a mm thick, but comes with one great big disadvantage:
It can so reduce the light getting to the eye as to be a hazard when driving.
When a glass or optical plastic lens is made with a prism form, this does not happen - and your driving licence is not at risk. You could probably get away with a Fresnel stick-on added to a reading area of a bi-focal lens, because you do not normally use that when driving.

Quite simple really - until you look into it (sorry, could not resist that one).

Geoff