Need help

[odydnas]

I think the one of the hardest parts about dealing with dry eye is people who do not understand. If someone complains about their leg hurting when they stand on it, everyone can sympathetize and understand. But why is it that no one understands that I am in a lot of pain when my eyes are open??? Even my family gives me crap about not being able to go to family functions on weekdays after work. But after a day at work, I can barely keep my eyes open and all I can think about is heading straight home and babying them. I'm not asking for sympathy from people, but I just wish they would understand instead of guilt-tripping me and thinking it's all in my head, especially my own family. I guess I'm just venting now because I really have no one to talk to who understands...I'm not sure how to deal with this any longer...please give me some advice.

[liz56]

You are so right

Hi, odydnas.

I agree with you. After a screamingly hard month of June last year, I began the treatment that finally paid off, but I was still blurry from erosions, showering with swimming goggles, wearing only button-down shirts to avoid bumping my eye, and doing everything that I could think of to keep any and all pressure off of very sore eyes that were in a delicate state. The first thing that I did to try and get back to normal was agree to go to dinner with friends, who knew from e-mail and phone calls, what I had been going through. When they saw me, their reaction was shock and surprise. They said that I looked "so normal" that "no one would ever think that you were going through all of that." I have such great friends, because they pointed out that pain on the level of dry eye does not look like pain as people picture it. This is often a complaint of people who suffer from migraine headaches. They have no blood gushing, bruises, or other outward manifestations of the pain, so people quickly treat them as if the pain is not there.

When I ran into my former dean, who had heard about all of the problems with my eye, he was looking right at my eyes, trying to see where the problem was. I told him that it was microscopic, on the uppermost layer of the cornea, but it was painful, vision blurring, and disruptive, nonetheless.

You raise a good point, and I am sorry that you are running into people who do not understand.