eye hurts after crying

[tearless2]

Hi, I have aqueous deficient dry eye, cause unknown. Possibly sero-neg sjogren's, hormones, contact lens related. My eyes were feeling not that bad during the day for the past 2 weeks or so. Then I cried yesterday (unrelated to dry eye) and ever since then my eye feels very red and burny all day. I also have blood vessels showing on the inside corner of my eye that weren't there before.

I have been uppping my use of oasis tears and trying hard to clean my eyelashes with a q-tip but my eyes feel terrible. I continue to use restasis and take fish oil. Do you know why tears cause this and what can I do to get back to where I was a few days ago?

Thanks in advance for the advice.

[Súil Eile]

This happens to me too. I think it's the trauma of crying and producing tears on top of already inflammed eyes that makes them irritated. Plus the tears aren't lubricating like they should naturally be, so your eyes are getting all worked up with none of the calming properties they should be getting from the tears.

I suppose you could treat it the same as you would if your eyes were irritated by wind or smoke etc, and just baby them for a few days.

I hope everything is ok

[indrep]

Tears from from crying (emotional and trauma tears) are high in salt content(hypertonic). This painful to already compromised ocular surface and further exacerbates the inflammatory response.

[Onaclearday]

I was looking at the "Theratears" web site to check if the night time Gel is available in Canada. After reading INDREP's response, mentioning that crying can cause a hypertonic response, I remembered that the Theratears web site mentioned that their artificial tear drop addresses "hypertonicity". I don't know if you have given Theratears a try before but it might be worth checking out the web site. As long as you are not sensitive to anything in them, it might be something you can use after crying?

[Guest]

My eyes also get majorly irritated if I cry for longer than a few seconds! I've gotten better at not letting myself cry...

Anyhow, when I have broken down and cried, I find it helps to flush out the tears afterwards with a vial of PF tears such as TheraTears or Bion Tears. If I've cried for too long, even that won't fix the irritation, but it definitely helps for shorter episodes of crying.

Don't worry though... your eyes will recover from the crying... sometimes it just takes a few days for everything to calm down... just baby them in the mean time!

[tearless2]

Thanks for the replies everyone. It took 2 days (it was a big cry) but my eyes are feeling back to how they were before. I think one thing that might have helped was I skipped a nighttime dosage of restasis.

After reading everyone's posts, I wish I had flushed my eyes out right away with some artificial tears. I will keep it in mind for next time - hopefully there won't be one for a very long time.