More dry eyes in London

[eva b]

Hello everyone

so pleased to have found this site! I've already learned an awful lot.

Brief history: herpes zoster infection in one eye (undiagnosed until too late), wrong treatment prescribed, procession of visits to emergency room and various specialists, all kinds of medications tried all of which made symptoms worse. Meibomian cyst surgically removed over a year ago, and the anaesthetics plus post-operative ointment caused unbearable burning and pain, which the specialist said was "impossible".

I saw yet another private specialist eventually, who came up with the diagnosis of blepharitis (mild/moderate), meibomian gland dysfunction, and having done that strip test (Schirmer?) said tear production was a bit low, but nothing major.

Eyes got better with perseverance of warm compresses twice a day and lid cleansing, but I've never been able to find any eye drop (even preservative free ones) or ointment that didn't end up irritating the hell out of my eyes.

Last autumn, soon as the hot air heating came on at work I was done for. Had to stop working, and the one visit I made to eye doctor and all the drops he used to examine my eyes put me right back where I was a year ago, with eyes feeling drier than ever.

I'm now scared to put anything at all in my eyes, and will get one of those sleep goggle masks to see if that helps.

Sorry to have gone on...I hope to get to know more of you as time goes on.

Best regards

Eva

[Zarla]

Hi Eva, I'm in London too and so is a poster called Rory. You have certainly posted on the right site as there is so much information here. I'm so sorry to hear that you are having such an awful time. I had such bad dry eye back in 1998 I couldn't even see a number plate at 25 metres with glasses and it took a few visits to Moorfields before they prescribed me doxycycline ( I took 200mg a day at first). Luckily I had no side effects with them, maybe due to only being 30. For six months I remember I couldn't cry at all - the first time was when my brother's baby was born and the tears actually HURT which was so strange and freaky. After about a year with doxy my condition began to improve and is now only mild compared to many here, though still painful every evening. Now I go on and off doxy depending on the severity of the dry eye - sometimes it really flares up but a couple of weeks of this antibiotic gets it back down.
I know from others on this forum that there are some great new treatments out there such as Restasis but the Uk docs aren't interested. Your only bet would be an online pharmacy and this isn't recommended really (although I have ordered successfully from quite a few over the years; stuff I've been prescribed already by doctors so know whether or not I'm getting the real deal). But I would never recommend one here as it's against the regulations. I have got Restasis, but haven't used it yet as I don't like the stories on here about the stinging.

[eva b]

Hi Zarla,
thanks for the reply and nice to meet you!

The last doc I saw suggested that I might try doxycycline as well, though he only threw it in as an afterthought, but I'm a bit nervous about trying it as some of the side effects in the leaflet sound quite severe - also, of course, the idea of taking antibiotics for a long time doesnn't particularly appeal. However, if it helps....

Do you know if many others here have tried it and benefitted?

hope you're doing Ok at the moment

Eva

[NYer]

Hi Eva,
We've been having a conversation about just that (Doxy) in another thread. Check it out:
http://www.dryeyezone.com/talk/showthread.php?t=4943

[Zarla]

Hi Eva - my eyes are ok at the moment; in fact I think I'm very lucky compared to some of the people here. I still get flare-ups and have real problems finding contacts that I can tolerate. I am currently still wearing the very old-fashioned but fairly dry eye friendly vial lenses zero 6, but on the advice of Calli and Stanza I'm going to try the new hydrogel. My eyes have a habit of chewing up nice healthy high water content lenses and spitting them out so I don't think Proclear (62% water ) would be an option. Are you able to wear contacts at all?

[eva b]

Hi Zarla,
thanks for the reply.

No I don't wear contacts - couldn't even face the prospect with the blepharitis irritation. Never needed glasses all the time anyway, until last year, only for reading (the usual age-related reasons)

But last year I had a shingles infection in right cornea (undiagnosed at the time because I had no pain, can you believe! - therefore untreated) which left me with scarring causing irregular astygmatism. Opthalmologist (private) suggested hard contact lenses would best correct the problem, but the thought of putting anything in my eyes fills me with horror - I would rather wear glasses...I'm long past caring about appearance

However, because of the corneal damage I now have to wear very strong glasses for reading, with some weird corrections, and also distance ones all the time to correct the long-sightedness in the left eye.

A somewhat complex and tiresome situation.

At the moment I've been using hot compresses for over a year, which do bring some relief, lid massage and cleaning, and occasional sterile saline drops.

I've never found any drops, even preservative free ones, which my eyes can tolerate. They seem to be hyper sensitive.

A veery sorry tale

[Zarla]

This sounds a pretty grim situation. Hard lenses would be very painful for you I would imagine. I tried a pair once and they felt exactly like what they are - hard bits of plastic in your eye. Strangely, the eye does seem to acclimatise, although in my case my tears turned greasy to form a kind of protective barrier and my vision went all foggy. So I only wore them for a day!