Guide · urgent
Flashes and floaters: the ones that need seeing the same day
A retinal tear caught the same day is a ten-minute laser. Left a week, it can be a detachment and an operation. The signs are specific, and this is them.
Harmless, mostly
The eye is filled with a clear jelly. From our forties it starts to liquefy and shrink, and strands of it float in front of the retina — floaters. They drift when you move your eyes and show against a bright sky. Annoying, common, and not dangerous. Most of us have them.
The same-day signs
When the jelly shrinks it can tug on the retina. Usually it lets go cleanly. Sometimes it tears the retina, and that’s the emergency:
- A sudden shower of new floaters — dozens, like soot or a swarm
- Flashes of light, arcs or sparks, at the edge of one eye, often noticed in the dark
- A shadow or curtain creeping in from the side
- Any of these after a blow to the head or eye
Ring. If we can’t dilate and examine you today we’ll tell you where can.
What we do
Dilating drops, then twenty minutes examining the whole retina — the microscope, the wide-field camera, the OCT. You’ll be blurry for a couple of hours afterwards; don’t drive yourself. If there’s a tear, we ring the eye hospital while you’re in the chair.
The wrong advice
“Give it a week and see.” A tear treated today is a small laser procedure in outpatients. A detachment a week later is surgery and possible permanent loss. There’s no version of this where waiting helps.
The short version
- Long-standing floaters that drift: harmless
- Sudden shower, flashes, a curtain: same day
- We dilate and examine the whole retina; hospital rung from the room
- Never “wait a week”