Refractive surgery, lagophthalmos, blepharitis, dry eye for 7 years, 27 y.o. female

[LizzyM]

Hi all,

I've been lurking for the past few weeks, sifting through the huge amount of information that's here and trying to figure out what next steps to take in my treatment. Time to introduce myself - as quickly as I can, since I can't stand to be at the computer much longer and you probably can't either.

I've recently been diagnosed with blepharitis, which I think is probably a correct diagnosis based on what I've read and the symptoms I've been experiencing lately. I've been dealing with dry eye for the past 6 years, but it's in the last year and a half that I noticed it got increasingly worse. I noticed my eye lids have become red all the time, the skin around my eyes is desperately dry (as well as my eyes themselves), I get gritty foreign body sensations, and I wake up with my eyes completely glued shut with crusting along my eyelids. I've also noticed I now have very visible dark veins all over my eye lids, although I don't know - does that have any relation to blepharitis?

The doctor I recently saw prescribed me some antibiotic drops and advised me to get some baby shampoo to wash my eye lids with. I've been following this treatment but am finding the baby shampoo terribly drying around my eyes and have read here that I could be using some gentler stuff.

I've got a couple of questions for now to get me started on my way to managing this:

1. What do people find is helpful for using on the dry, sensitive skin around the eyes? I've always used a Garnier cosmetic eye cream which is hydrating but I'm wondering if there is something else I should be trying.

2. My doctor's note says "baby shampoo 5cc / 80g H20" (I think - his writing is cryptic). I have no idea what this means, and I couldn't find anything like that on the baby shampoo bottles, so I just bought a generic shampoo, hoping the whole point of this exercise is just to keep my eyes reasonably clean. Anyone know what this means and whether it should matter?

3. I see that there are special lid scrubs I can be buying. But I've also read that just keeping my eyelids and lashes clean with water, or even a bit of face cleanser, should also be enough to keep blepharitis under control. So, I'm wondering what I should be doing. I don't want to be buying a bunch of stuff I don't need.

4. Does anyone have any advice for gentle makeup that can be used to cover up the redness? Any tips for using makeup in general in a way that won't aggravate this condition? I've basically given up makeup over the past 3 months because it wasn't enough and I worried it was making things worse. But I'm worried I look terribly unprofessional at work!

Thanks if you have any suggestions and if you can refer me to past posts...like I said, there's a tremendous amount of info here on this forum, but it's a little bit of a challenge for me to sit at a computer screen for a while and try to find what I need

[littlemermaid]

LizzyM, Welcome - hopefully someone else can advise about makeup because I don't use any 'products' around the eyes or face because they seem to have components that make things worse. Amazingly, I just use a tiny amount of Vaseline for dry skin and it has no 'side effects'.

Baby shampoo as an eyelid cleaner is an out-of-date detergent remedy because now there are the formulated eyelid cleaners available you have seen. Obviously detergent destroys the much needed oils in the tear film - I think the original benefit was found for people with sebaceous blepharitis so I don't know how this became a mainstream recommendation.

Hopefully any eyedrops you have been prescribed are preservative-free? And that the eye doc has helped you find artifical tears that you like, to keep things good?

Again, the main thing is not to set up a sensitivity or allergies to chemical ingredients. I would definitely not use face cleanser around a dry eye, though. We just use a warm steamy flannel, or boiled water (cooled to comfort) and cotton wool. A warm shower is good for blepharitis.

'5cc/80g H2O' - he is trying to write how to dilute the baby shampoo in water (H2O). If you do feel you want to use baby shampoo, I would use absolutely the minimum, one tiny drop in a litre jugful of hot/warm water.

I'm a non-starter on makeup because any attempt has made blepharitis very much worse and the risk of infected blepharitis and cross-infection is too great. Some people have had eyelash tinting disasters. The best advice we've had is eyelash curling. Just to clarify, it's my teenage daughter I'm talking about with rosacea, so we are very aware of how hypersensitivities affect her eyes, and how she becomes sensivitive to things after using them for a while. Any sensitivity reaction makes her rosacea face flare with inflammation and the meibomian glands pack in and clog up, so this is how we can see the correlation that might be useful for other people.

Hoping you've got remedies for the lagophthalmos - night-time mask or taping?

You can use advanced search at top right of the screen to sort out useful posts. I do hope this is working for you and that you can find useful tips here with us, and in http://www.dryeyezone.com/