2024-04-08 21:05:07
A woman from Brooklyn, USA, bitterly regrets watching the solar eclipse with the naked eye in 2017: she now lives with irreversible damage to her eyes.
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Bridget Kyeremateng, 29, hadn’t been able to get her hands on glasses that offered adequate protection, but figured a few seconds mightn’t do her any harm.
“I mightn’t focus on the sun or the exact curvature of the moon. I thought I would close one eye to concentrate better. I might barely see anything, but I looked at the sun for a good 10 to 15 seconds before my eyes started to feel bad, so I went inside,” she said in an interview with New York Post.
For the rest of the day she had no effects and felt fine. It was the next day that things got worse, when she was no longer able to read the words on the screen of her cell phone with her left eye, the one with which she had watched the eclipse. “I mightn’t see all the words because there was a blind spot in the middle of my iris,” she recalled.
At first she thought she wasn’t fully awake, but she soon realized something was wrong.
After seeing an ophthalmologist, she learned that although she had no damage to her retina, she had vision distortion due to her eye being exposed to the sun. This is called “slow 20/20 vision,” explained Bridget Kyeremateng. She said she can see perfectly, but it takes more time to read letters and words with her left eye.
“I think my right eye and left eye work in tandem, but it doesn’t affect me much anymore. I know that eyesight deteriorates with age. […] It’s just a matter of time, but I hope that with proper precautions and continuing to wear sunglasses, I can slow the progression,” said the woman who now suffers from headaches and pain. migraines on the left side of the head.
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