A woman on TikTok is warning others about looking directly at the eclipse without protective eyewear. She did it back in 2017 and now as a result has slow 20/20 vision. It happened after just 10 seconds.
She does not want other people to experience what she has. The Tiktoker hates that she has something in common with former President Donald Trump who she calls “the orange man.” He famously looked directly into the sun in 2017 as well.
“I did look at the solar eclipse six and a half years ago,” Bridge confessed. “I didn’t realize, or just didn’t get the glasses, and I thought it wasn’t gonna be a big deal, and I closed my right eye and I stared at the sun for a good, like, 15 seconds Didn’t think anything of it. Not an issue.”
It wasn’t an issue until the next day. It is possible to damage your retina and not feel anything because the area does not have pain receptors, notes NASA. She did notice changes in her vision the following day.
“I opened up my left eye to read on my phone. And I couldn’t read every other word,” she went on to say. “There was, like, a blind spot on every other word that I was reading.”
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At first she was in disbelief. She thought she just had not fully woken up. She drove herself to the eye doctor but “couldn’t see the signs” on the ride over.
After much testing she and her medical team determined that looking directly at the eclipse caused eye damage. “There was some damage that was done to something,” she explained. “Certain parts of my eye is distorted,” and because of that she now has “slow 20/20 vision.”
She wants others to learn from her mistakes. This all happened “because I stood at the solar eclipse without the glasses for ten seconds six and a half years ago. So don’t be like me and that orange man,” she concluded. The Journal of the American Medical Association agrees, warning "once retina tissue is destroyed, it cannot regenerate, resulting in permanent central vision loss."
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