Photopsia

I apologize for the lack of blogging lately.  We are in the process of moving and selling and that process has kept me quite busy over the last few weeks. Hopefully by the end of the year we will be all settled in and things will be back to normal.

However I did have a story to share with a little science thrown in.   It all started on a camping trip with the boys.   Everything started like a normal trip. The boys were playing and having a good time.  We cooked supper, roasted marsh mellows and went to bed.  Everything we good until about 5:00 in the morning when the little one woke me up saying he was was seeing things in the tent.  I just thought he was having a bad dream and had him get a little closer to me in the tent.  That worked until about 5:30 when he woke me up again and said he was still seeing things.   I put him in the sleeping bag with me, but again that only worked until about 6 AM when things really went downhill.  He woke me up saying he was seeing red bugs and they were everywhere.  He said they were coming out of my skin and going into his skin.  He started swatting at them and freaking out.  I could not console him.  He stated to scream to get him out of the tent.   We were were camping on a lake, so at this point I picked him up and walked him down to the lake where I tried to console him for a while and after about 45 minutes had calmed him down.  The rest of the day he was fine and playing just like any other day.

I attributed these visions of "red bugs" to a really bad and vivid dream.   But then we came to night time and no sooner had he gone to bed than we heard crying.  He was seeing the bugs again.  And he was definitely seeing something.  He was shaking and would physically try to push them way from him.  The only thing to remotely calm him down was him sitting on the couch with me downstairs in the light.  At this point I was starting to get concerned.   I knew better than google hallucinations but dit it anyway and of course and it says things you don't really want to hear.   The next night ended up being the same.  We could only get him sleep by putting him in the bed with us.  We had him draw what he was seeing and once we did that, the drawings were very much in line with what a floater might look like.  This all started to make a little sense.  Floaters move and it could easily look like a bug coming out of your skin or going into someone.  Over the next couple nights he started to realize that even though he was seeing these things, they were not hurting him and he would at least go to sleep now.

We took him to the doctor to get his eyes checked out and sure enough he was seeing floaters which is called photopsia. There are different reasons to see these, with one of the most common being retinal detachment.  In his case, everything looked fine with his eyes.   But in some people, photopsia is caused from actually seeing the shadow of the blood vessels in your eyes.  They can appear as red, clear, purple floaters.  In some people they can be very bad especially against certain backgrounds and the person will need to stop what they are doing to focus on a different landscape or background.
He says he still sees the floaters but now that he can rationalize what is going on he lives with it wtih no problem.  The doctor says they may eventually go away or he may see the floaters off and on the rest of his life.  In either event, it is a harmless phenomenon, but one that gave us quite a scare.