UK Keratoconus Self-Help and Support Association

Hi All

Ok sticking my neck out (your all gonna think I am mad)here and I know self diagnosis aint a good thing.

Does anyone else see things that aren't quite wot they seem to be.

Check this link

Not gonna say anymore for fear of self incrimination.

Look forward to your replies.

Drew

I know someone who has no central and only limited periferal vision.

They describe what they are looking at as if the images they see are cartoons in the way they are constructed.

They lost their sight lat on in life.

The only time i have had what some may call an halucination, others an out of body experience was when I was involved in a car accident. I can describe in perfect detail what happend from the point of view that I was stood behind the car that hit me on the opposite side of the road where it was safe.

Drew
There's a condition called Charles Bonnet syndrome which usually affects elderly people with poor eyesight.They get very vivid halucinations eg animals in their front room and sadly their family/carers often interpret it as going senile. Exact cause is unknown but sufferers invariably have visual impairment, usually macular degeneration.I havent come across it with KC!Does this help at all?

Ali,

Drew has nystagmus and other visual probs as well... so Charles Bonnet wouldn't be out of the way.

Dew, I have come across many people who "see" things that are not there. I often have to ask them directly because, as Ali suggests, they are afraid of being thought a bit strange to say the least! One lady who had high myopia and and macular degeneration saw gargoyles and "little green men".

Another lady found her wallpaper regularly looked like it was growing roses and a patient who had glaucoma kept seeing a man with a bowler hat sitting beside him (who needless to say, wasn't there!).

All of this is possibly because the brain is tryimg to decipher scrambled images and basically fills in the gaps so it sees something that it can make sense of.

Would be interested to hear what YOU see, if you can bring yourself to post it lol!

Lynn

can i ask what you see? i see lots of things but i just have an overactive imagination!

nothing wrong with self diagnosis

Pre-graft it wasn't unusual for me to think I saw black cats in my peripheral vision. Until I got used to them they were very real to me and I would look to see where they had gone or whatever. After I while I knew it was just my eyes playing silly devils and decided it must be as Lynn said - my brain trying to make sense of the scrambled information my eyes were sending it. Although I don't see them now they were such a problem to me that I still don't 100% trust my sight which is one of my main reasons for not driving.

Other than my hubbie I've never really told anyone about them before, although I think I might have mentioned them in one of my posts here. I never thought to. I just assumed they were part and parcel of having lousy eyesight.

OKay Alison..

you got me hooked now!

One of the problems with this syndrome is people dont report what they see for fear of being thought silly at best and mad at worst. I feel it would be good to collate info on what exactly people DO see! I am also interested because, as Ali says, its often with degenerative probs that you get these images reported.. not something like KC.

Black cats I have heard of before. I can think of about 3 other patients reporting them and that sort of relates to the guy with the man in a black bowler hat. One woman used to see the cat running across straight in front of her..rather than in her peripheral vision

im no expert, but what i find interesting is that their are several accounts of people seeing the same sort of things, and the relevance of hats. i believe this could be the route of lepricorns? just a hunch lol

Hats....???

i googled and found some things talking about a trend in hats - such as pixies wearing hats, chimney sweeps.

http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/bonnet.html

heres one random one