Joining the Club

[ucdcrew]

I found this site through Google after searching for Dry Eyes. Hopefully I will learn some good stuff here. I always thought I had dry eyes but I didn't know they could be this big of a problem. I do wear contacts, but my eyes got so dry that I ended up having ulcers on my corneas, which I'm sure everyone else knows really suck. Right now I'm wearing my glasses, using a antibiotic and a steroid to get calmed down. Hopefully we can address the problem so this doesn't happen again! Anyone have any advice?

[Hopeful2]

Get the dry eyes under control by; not wearing contacts, minimizing your computer use, taking fish oils, using preservative free artificial tears.

Improve your overall health by following a low sugar low processed food diet, exercise, and get plenty of quality relaxing time. Many people here find that their dry eye symptoms are worse with added stress.

DO NOT in any way shape or form, allow yourself to be talked into having refractive surgery!! No form of refractive surgery is safe for dry eyes... many of us here turned to Lasik or PRK because we could no longer wear our contacts.

[Rebecca Petris]

Hi ucdcrew and welcome!

Ulcers, zowie. Sorry to hear that.

After you get the ulcer aftermath under control I'd take things nice and slow... It is really hard when you are used to contacts to not rush back to them, but considering what happened, taking a decent amount of time out to just observe how your eyes are for awhile post-recovery will be important. The thing with contacts is they can be a double-edged sword of sorts... On the one hand, they can make dry eye symptoms worse, but on the other, they can also mask symptoms (because they shield your cornea from the outside air... in fact many people use them therapeutically after erosions, etc). So people with dry eye getting progressively worse may not realize the lenses are contributing because they feel better when they have the lenses in.

Read & read and read some more - not the scary stories, but the good solid information on caring for the eyes especially the meibomian (oil) glands in the eyelids. When you go through a dry eye "crisis" it's important to try to avoid overmedicating too.

[ucdcrew]

I know the ulcers actually felt better with the contact in, almost like it was keeping it from being exposed to the air and burning so bad. When I took off the contacts and switched to glasses, it hurt so much worse. Now with the steroid drop my eyes feel much better and even are less red. I'm just hoping the vision will get less blurry in that eye soon so that my glasses will work the way they should and I can see better. Right now its like one eye prescription is right, but the other is blurry. They weren't that way when I got them a month ago, so I'm assuming its the ulcer/dryness causing it. I see the doctor again tomorrow, and I'm sure I'll have a whole new basket of questions!

One I forgot to ask the pharmacist - is it okay to use the non-preservative artificial tears after the steroid? Not like right away, but maybe give it an hour? I don't want to mess up the steroid.

[Rebecca Petris]

One I forgot to ask the pharmacist - is it okay to use the non-preservative artificial tears after the steroid? Not like right away, but maybe give it an hour? I don't want to mess up the steroid.

No problem - 10-15 minutes in between drops should be fine.

[ucdcrew]

Thanks! I will check in again tomorrow!