What should I do if I lose my vision suddenly?
If you lose your vision suddenly, there are generally three possible causes. One is you have a retinal detachment that is that the retina, the inner layer of your eye is peeled off. Well, that is an emergency but it can usually be partially fixed by surgery. The second common cause, relatively common cause is what we call vascular disease. One of the blood vessels that feeds the eye or the nerve to the eye gets plugged up. The eye loses its blood supply and the tissue dies either permanently or it is temporarly impaired and the vision comes back. The third possible cause and this is by far the best thing that may have happened is what we call an ophthalmic migraine. Certain types of migraine headaches are proceeded by vision impairment. And usually that produces jagged lines, different colors. There may be a vibrating or scintillating quality and those vision changes are often followed by a headache. That fortunately tends to be very benign because the vision gets blurry or disappears for ten or fifteen minutes then comes back to normal. If that happens to you it's certainly worth seeing a doctor anyway because there are certain conditions in the brain called an arterio-venous malformation that are on rare occasions associated with this. So all of these conditions would lead to you seeing an eye doctor as quickly as possible.
