Despite a commonly held belief, vigorous exercise does not increase the risk of detachment, though it is true that welterweight Sugar Ray Leonard took several long timeouts in his boxing career to recover from detached retinas.

Sleep, more than aerobics, is likely to spur retinal detachment, Solomon says. “That’s because during REM, or rapid eye movement sleep, your eyes are under most stress, whipping back and forth as you’re dreaming.”

How they fix it

In recent decades, ophthalmologists have developed several repairs, said to work in more than 85 per cent of patients, when a tear is caught in time. Those include the scleral buckle (a silicone band that pushes in the eyeball so the retina can reattach), injecting a gas bubble in the eye to press the retina back into place, and vitrectomy (replacing the vitreous gel in the eye with a clear liquid). In almost all cases, these techniques are combined with use of a laser or extreme cold to weld the retina back in place.

I had the bubble cure. It wasn’t painful, but it was extremely weird walking around with a large blue-green bubble bobbing around like a beach ball in my field of vision. Over six weeks, the bubble got smaller and eventually disappeared. I was also under orders to do no reading and no work. Very sad -- a month of TV and books on tape!

A month later, even before the bubble was gone, I was back to my regular life: working, reading, swimming and driving. The flashes and floaters were gone. My retinal detachment seemed like a bad dream that had come and gone in the blink of an eye.