What have I got?

[tristanmc99]

My vision is 6/5 but I saw an opthamologist and they took two scans of my eyes.  One was where I looked into a cone shaped instrument with a swirl in it, in the scan it showed hozizontal lines going left to right, if they were perfect they would all be straight, but the ones near the top were all over the place while the bottom ones were fine.  In the other scan I had to look into a thing that had a grid which had an infra red light in the centre when aligned correctly, for my right eye the scan was a yellow circle (my eye) and for the left it was a yellow circle but with a large amount of orange in the centre which wasn't normal.

I usually don't notice any defects in my vision, but in poor lighting, looking at something bright or shiney (eg. whie writing on black background) will be doubled or (more or less) but not clearly (only the bright object is doubled), the worse the lighting, or the brighter the object ,the worse.  If the object is silver or white and the lighting particuarly bad there is a barely noticable rainbow above the silver doubling.  If I hold my finger abover the top part of my eye everything appears normal.  At night is when I notice all this more, lights have a kind of starburst effect, but only vertical (above the object).  The first I ever noticed of this was when I looked at my teeth in they mirror and noticed that they had a white outline that was not there, this appears also below the teeth not just above which is more unusual.  As much as I tried focusing, squinting, opening my eyes wide it would not fix it and the lighting was good.  All this is worse if I am tired or have read for a while.  I get eye strain and my focusing of both eyes is not great, 9-11 on a test where the optometrist put a lense in front of one eye and then asked me to look at an arrow which pointed at a number (lower the better).

So what exactly is this and is it bad?  Is it common?  Can it be fixed by any eye excercises (the opthamologist said technically it could be fixed by laser eye surgery but he wouldn't consider it, because it wasn't that bad).

Any help or advice I will appreciate.

[John C Hagan III, MD, FACS, FAAO]

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[tristanmc99]

The opthamologist did a pinhole test and this removed the vertical ghosting and refraction.  Other than this I have perfect vision, slightly better in right eye, the ghosting is much worse in the left eye, although there is some in the right eye.  Some examples of when I notice this are:  White writing on black background in poor lighting, if I am in a dark room and it is bright outside, the bright crack under the door is larger vertically than it should be and may have a small rainbow as well, at night street lights are larger than should be and a big one that is really obvious is in my room if the light is off and the only thing I can see is the digital clock, I can read the time easily but above it will be a green (the numbers are green) blurry mess (ghosting), that resemles the time eg. say it was 10:00 I would be able to read it easily but above it, it would read 10:00 but really blurry and spread out.  If I turn the light on all this goes away.

[John C Hagan III, MD, FACS, FAAO]

Sorry I can't put the pieces together. See an Eye MD for a second opinion or call the Eye MD back and get more details of your exam.
JCH MD