The world just aint as it seems

[Lynn White]

Ahhh!

Well of the patients who have talked to me, I only had one with hats. This link IS interesting though.. as why would one resolve scrambled images as HATS? Especially as nowadays we dont wear them much?

[Sweet]

Well i don't see things but until i had a graft i would sometimes get a sudden black shadow in the corner of my left eye as if someone had just quickly moved past me. I used to find this very un-nerving at times and would start looking for someone but i just took it as my bad eyesight as i couldn't see much with that eye except for a blur of colour.

The only time i really paid much attention to it was when driving as suddenly i would think that someone was going to run out from the kerb. It caused a little trouble when i suddenly made an emergency stop on a driving lesson one day and luckily there was no-one close behind me! LOL!

Now post graft i can just about make out objects though they are blurry but i don't seem to get this sudden shadow anymore. Not too sure if this is anywhere near what this thread is about, but thought i'd post it anyway!

Sweet X x X

[Alison Fisher]

Never saw hats but love wearing them.

Never felt like I'd be seen as silly, I just didn't think it important.

[Drew Radcliffe]

Ok in for a penny in for a pound.

When I walk down the High Street I see street in full sometimes its blurry KC type image other times the buildings look right just like they should but the signs above the door of all of them are Marks & Spencer signs (used to work for them if thats significant).

I can lookout of train windows at green fields and see country churches that I know aren't there.

Buildings like churches end up with extra steeples, towers etc.

If I walk through my local council estate (thats the only place I know where everyone has satallite telly) the satallite dishes on every house look like the postoffice roundel signs that hang outside the post office.

I have seen an old lady walking down the street with a brown leather bag - I saw it as a dog walking next to her until she got near enough to see it clearly then it was a bag.

Thats the kinda stuff i see. One min its real then when I suspect its not I walk closer and it turns back to what it should be.

I have talked about this with my consultant he didn't believe me and offered to refer me to a psych which is why I haven't mentioned it on here before.

Its only since reading about Charles Bonnet syndrome I thought id post about it.

Its quite a dangerous thing to live with as you can't trust what your seeing.

I'd like to know if I can get support in dealing with it other than the stuff I am already doing like challenging what I am seeing when the view appears out of context.

Thanks all

Drew

[brigid downing]

Hi
I have seen a black cat out of the corner of my eye on several occaisions. I look again and it is gone and I know that it was not real - which suggests to me that somewhere in my brain i know i am not really seeing them. I just put it down to a glitch in the matrix
Brigid

[Alison Fisher]

The only time i really paid much attention to it was when driving as suddenly i would think that someone was going to run out from the kerb. It caused a little trouble when i suddenly made an emergency stop on a driving lesson one day and luckily there was no-one close behind me! LOL!

I'd be a passenger in my hubby's car, see a 'cat' and have a panicked moment when I couldn't understand why he wasn't reacting and being sure we'd run it over. Other times I'd wonder why he was manoeuvring the car in a certain way and suddenly realise there was a huge lorry there that I hadn't seen. I got so used to not trusting what my eyes told me that I still don't instinctively trust them now.

You're spot on Drew when you say that it is a dangerous thing to live with.

[Andrew MacLean]

Drew

When I first went blind I used to see all sorts of things: trees that suddenlky became people, gates across the morotway etc. My doc explained that it was my brain struggling to make sense of the fragmented and scrambled image it was 'reading' rom my eye.

I think I'd have liked to see people in hats. I wear them, but I was too much of a realist to imagine that the world had suddenly become style conscious.

Andrew

[Lynn White]

Thanks for all this!!

The black cat does seem very common I must say!

Drew... as far as I know there is no support specifically for this condition - I just rechecked on the RNIB website and they same the same.

They do say contact these people for more info:

For more information on the Charles Bonnet Syndrome please contact Dr Dominic ffytche and Dr Robert Howard at:

Section of Old Age Psychiatry
Institute of Psychiatry
London SE5 8AF
Telephone 020 7919 3550.

which I found a bit offputting myself.. ie being a Psychiatry address! (Not to mention old age!!) However, if you contact them you may well get some official recognition that you can talk to your consultant about etc. Worth a try!

[GarethB]

Drew,

I can understand the satelite dishes looking like post office signs.

Apart from the colour they have a similar profile, well the sky digital ones do. So if your eyes are more familier with the post office signs and the brain is filling in the blanks, it makes perfect sense to me.

Just like the handbag/dog. I have seen befoe old ladys carrying their dog in a handbag or a shopping bag before. This was definitly real because I chose to be quite thinking it was my inamgination, but then the group I was with all commented on the cute dog in the handbag!

[rosemary johnson]

I once asked for a slice of chocolate gateau in a pub where I was havng Sunday dinner.
THe bar-person said she didn't have any, so I asked what that was, and pointed.
"That's a pile of sausages," she said, and picked up the white plate they were laid out on.
Now, it wasn't a brilliantly well-lit pub, but I had only had one beer! - and in my defence, that pub often did have chocolate gateau, which sat on a white plate on the counter behind the bar where the sausages were, looking appealingly striped in varying shades of brown.
We had a bit of a laugh. I didn't get a desert after all.

The other "odd things I see" relates to those black splodges with long streaks coming out that float across my eyes - well, they don't float, in that they stay still if I really try hard to keep my eyes still, you know.
I seem to get a lot of them so there's always some splodge/streak somewhere in my vision.
I do know what they are if I think about it.
But sometimes they can look like mozzies flying about.
Or mozzies flying about look like marks in my eyes.
But when I'm sitting about in the evening and catch a glipse of something moving at the side of my vision, I all-too-often have this sudden nasty shock feeling of thnking there's a mouse running around in here.
Particularly in the kitchen in the evenings.
I think this is apranoia as much as anything.
Rosemary