A 68-year-old woman went in for her yearly eye checkup with no complaints. A scan found a hole running through the full thickness of the retina at the center of her left eye. Surgery was recommended. She declined, and by her three-month follow-up visit, the hole had closed on its own.
The case, published in 2026 in the American Journal of Ophthalmology Case Reports, describes an outcome the authors call very rare: a full-thickness macular hole sealing without an operation in an eye stretched by severe nearsightedness. Later imaging also showed signs that the light-sensing cells around the old opening were recovering.
