I have a genetic disease called retinitus pigmentosa.

If you hold your arm straight out in front of you and make a fist then the area covered by the fist is about the same size as the area I can still see. Everything outside of it is overlaid with dark tv static. Sometimes there are white streaks that slowly move around in the static but I only see those when I'm moving around. The white streaks are kind of rare and only last a few seconds. That's a shame, really. They're quite beautiful.

Most of the time I don't notice the static. I've gotten used to it. I see it now because I'm thinking about it while writing this, but in a few more minutes I won't notice it anymore. When I step outside into the sunlight or turn on the bathroom light in the morning I really notice it.

I was declared legally blind in July but I probably met the criteria for legal blindness months before that. Nobody tested my field of vision before then. My visual acuity is still good. It's 20/25 in one eye and 20/20 in the other. I can still differentiate colors. Yellow is still my favorite because sunshine and SpongeBob. I can still read text messages on my phone. But I see the world through a drinking straw and that straw is made of dark tv static. In America there are two definitions of legal blindness; having uncorrectable vision worse than 20/200 in your better eye, or having a field of vision less than 20 degrees. Mine is about 12 degrees horizontally and 8 or 9 degrees vertically. My straw is shaped like a football, or, ironically, like a human eye.

Apparently my genetic code has a sense of humor.

To answer your question, the static isn't what I saw before I went legally blind, it's *how* I went blind. It constricted my field of vision to the point of legal blindness. It's the mechanism, not a precursor.

My vision loss isn't finished. I lose a little more light perception each week. The doctors don't know when I'll be totally blind but I'm estimating I have another year or two. The static keeps getting darker and the viewable radius keeps getting smaller. I don't expect my eyes to just shut off one day - I think things will keep getting darker and darker until there's nothing left for me to see.

I'm not a doctor but from what I was able to understand of what my doctor told me, I see static because the cells in my retina are dying. There might be other reasons besides retinitus pigmentosa for cells in the retina to die. Again, I don't want you to read too much into this because I'm absolutely not a doctor, but it might be something correctable like a vitamin deficiency. You should book an appointment with a retina specialist to find out more.

I don't know if this is what you're describing, but something similar happens to me relatively often from the occasional vitreous hemorrhage. This is different from the everyday floaters, which I've dealt with all my life. When I have bleeding in my eye I see weird dots/haziness, and red and black. It's generally worse in the morning, presumably because the blood pools in the back of my eye in that position. In fact, there have been times when I've slept sitting up for months on end trying to get a bad one to clear so my doctor could see what was causing it (I'm still not totally sure how much that helps and if it's worth the discomfort). I've had vitrectomies, but sometimes bleeds will clear on their own, and laser is often needed on the leaking vessels.

I was born with congenital glaucoma but had 20/20 vision. I slowly lost my site (acuity and field at separate rates), and I went completely blind in my early 20s. There were a few instances in my teenage years when I would wake up and have fuzziness or other visual obstacles that lasted only a day or so. My doctor said that what I was seeing was dried or residual blood from something happening inside my eye.

I don’t have this, but isn’t it called a visual snow or something?