My name is Juan, and I’m from Spain—Mallorca, to be exact. I want to thank Sierra for her work and awareness efforts; without her, I would never have understood what was happening to me.
My story began 18 years ago. At the time, I was a professional athlete—specifically, a professional boxer. I mention this because even at a very young age I already had floaters and visual snow, and every doctor told me it was due to boxing, that the punches had caused this condition. Because of that, I decided to leave my professional sports career and focus on the other profession I had studied: physiotherapy.
Being a healthcare professional allowed me to speak with many doctors, neurologists, and ophthalmologists, but none of them could give me an explanation. “Your brain is fine,” one would say, and “your eyes are fine,” said another. This led me into deep frustration, and even periods of severe anxiety and almost depression because of the helplessness. Some doctors told me it was just floaters, others said it was anxiety and derealization, and for a long time I believed that what I had was derealization.
The condition hasn’t stopped me from progressing in life. I’ve had my own physiotherapy clinic for more than ten years, helping many people. I’ve completed university degrees, a master’s, a postgraduate program, and later made a radical career change and became a firefighter. I currently work as a firefighter on a Spanish island called Ibiza.
This past year has been very stressful—firefighting has extremely tough moments. Recently, I caught a virus, and my entire body triggered an autoimmune reaction against itself, which led to a hospital admission. I’ve been on medical leave for two months now, and during that time the visual snow has come back stronger than ever. That’s when I began researching and discovered that I’m not alone—that many people live with this condition.
