Central Serous Retinopathy: Trying to Find Some Clues

One of our writers has had to deal with an eye condition known as Central Serous Retinopathy. Since we work with eye surgeons I asked her to write about it and agreed to post it on this blog. She has written a series of nine blogs on her experience with Central Serous Retinopathay.

This is blog post 2 of 9:

When it didn't seem to be going away on it's own I decided to try looking it up online. I am familiar with common symptoms of eye conditions. I have been writing about them for a few years now. This problem didn't really fit anything I knew.

It bears the closest resemblance to macular degeneration, but in all the examples I have seen of what the spot looks like in macular degeneration it has fuzzy edges. (Check out this online macular degeneration interactive vision test.) Mine doesn't. The edges are crisp. I also wasn't noticing any waviness of lines, which is a hallmark of macular degeneration.

The only good word I could come up with to describe it was "afterimage". That is exactly what it looks like and I started out thinking that is what it was and thinking I knew what caused it, so the impression and the word stuck.

That is where I started with my research and I found nothing useful, except a few posts made me feel pretty sure a laser pointer could not have caused it. Ocular migraines kept coming up when I searched, but the information just didn’t match my problem. I couldn’t believe that there was no information on this out there. It was very frustrating.

I later discovered that when I look up central serous retinopathy symptoms, I never would have recognized it by reading about it on most of the websites. Reading personal accounts of living with the condition paints a very different picture, much more like my experience.

Here are some additional resources on macular degeneration -

Article about Age Related Macular Degeneration

Article about Detection and Prevention of Macular Degeneration