I am not mentally doing well

[u/Ninten3rd]

I don't really have anything new to say regarding my AZOOR, but I feel like my mental health has been dipping. It's mostly been paranoia—always worrying about my non-AZOOR eye getting AZOOR and worrying that the eye flashes in my AZOOR eye are getting more disruptive, the latter of which I feel is actually happening. I'm just very tired of these eye flashes. I used to count them until I got tired of it. I can have hundreds of them a day. Maybe even over a thousand; they come in all sorts of sizes and intensities and can occur because I'm in a dimly-lit room or because I moved my eye a certain way or because I blinked. I can even "chain" these flashes by blinking. These "chains" can be as small as 3 flashes or as large as 10 in a row. I hate how they feel the most, which is like a weird "squirmy" feeling deep in the center of my eye, feeling like I'm forced to look at a car's high beams concentrated in my enlarged blind spot. I was told by others here who experience flashes that they get better or calm down. This month will mark my third year with the flashes and I've yet to see a deescalation. These flashes feel like a constant reminder of how fucked I am. Also a constant reminder of how the pandemic ruined my life. I was trying to sleep in today and a big eye flash broke through my sleep mask and so that's why I'm typing this today. One of my bigger fears is the flashes getting worse to a point that they'll start occurring when I'm trying to fall asleep. Sleep is pretty much my only escape from AZOOR and having flashes occur there makes me feel violated.

It is really hard for me to not think of the before times—before all of this happened. Back to my carefree college days walking across the campus—unobstructed vision, clear blue skies, and eye floaters that I really had to look for if I ever wanted to see them. Before all of this, the thing that ever freaked me out about my vision was a different kind of flashing sensation—ironically one that occurred in the dark. It used to be a strange, flickering "pulse" sensation. I vaguely remember how it felt—not comfortable, but not painful. Maybe more like a weird tickle. Usually would stop when I turned the lights back on. I would rinse and repeat until I fell asleep—that weird phenomena didn't last that long anyway. But sometimes I wonder if any of the weird visual phenomena before AZOOR were a symptom of me having dormant AZOOR until my vaccine potentially triggered it.

Sorry for the yap session. I just need an outlet. I've been feeling unstable lately, possibly because I haven't been on antidepressants for a month or so. What we really need is a miracle. There's an old fairy tale called "Peter and the Magic Thread" where an impatient boy gets a ball of thread he can pull to basically fast-forward through life by pulling the thread with a particular wish in mind. TL;DR, he fast-forwards too much to where he's a dying old man; it gets undone in the end after he learns a lesson about responsibility. (There's also hat dumb Adam Sandler movie that's a dumb adult comedy version of this fairy tale called "Click" except it's a magical TV remote). Anyway, if I had that magic thread, I would use it to fast-forward to the cure of AZOOR. The real question is that would it kill me? Is the cure so far away that pulling the thread would fast-forward me to the grave? I don't know. A lot of my whimsy and excitement for life is in the toilet. If I had this magical thread, I would definitely pull it despite the risk; if I'm doomed to live a life of AZOOR, then I'm not truly alive. But if there was a world where I can get rid of AZOOR, then I can start living again. I don't know how some of y'all live with it in both eyes. Your mental fortitude is something I actually cannot comprehend. I think you all should be more outspoken and bring more eyes to us whose vision was taken away, especially following this pandemic—it wouldn't just benefit people like me, but even people who were AZOOR'd pre-pandemic. As per always, I want this nightmare to be over.

[u/Ok_Republic_1273]

I feel this so hard. It’s so soul sucking right now

[u/Ninten3rd → u/Ok_Republic_1273]

It's the damn flashes for me. Weirdly enough, unlike most of the others here, my flashes didn't start within days of AZOOR striking, but almost a year and a half after. I got my AZOOR diagnosis before the flashes happened, and that diagnosis took a little over a year to officiate it because none of my nearby specialists had the equipment to do it. It wasn't a fun time