What is your job and does dry eye affect it?

[alex123711]

Just looking for insight on what type of work people here do and how dry eye affects your job, would you recommend it to someone with dry eye? I am currently looking for a new career more suited to dry eyes.

[Katewest]

Hi Alex- I'm 31 and live in the Utah desert…I know!!! (Moving in a few months) I have MGD, Ocular Rosacea, and evaporative dry eye. I used to be a school counselor but the office air, computer, and lighting made me so miserable. I quit and now opened my own business. It's very slow going but I honestly don't know what else I can do. But here are some thoughts….mail delivery person, sales (maybe work from home?) ok I guess thats all I can think of for right now…hopefully some other people have ideas.

[No tears in ATL]

You'll want to stay away from computer programming and financial analysis (using excel), that's for sure! Depending on what your climate is like, for example, if you live in the Southeast, where it is a bit more humid, you could look into outdoor type jobs, like environmental/forest protection/game warden/park ranger, home building, agriculture. I know of an engineer who got laid off and opened a business doing pressure washing and LOVES it. Home-based sales, like Katewest suggested, could work, depending on your personality. But don't do anything you hate--that kind of stress is no good for your dry eye!

[MartyM1985]

I work as a freelance video editor.

When my eyes first bottomed out in Jan 2013, I took a 6 month break from all screens except my phone. I was pretty much disabled until May of that year.

It's now a year later, and I have slowly improved, but I'm sadly not back to my original state. I'd say I'm not as bad as the worst cases... I can exercise and watch a lot of TV, but I can't wear contacts or go outside without sunglasses.

Anyway, I work as a freelance video editor, often from home but also in various offices. It's not as demanding as programming, but it can still be a task.

http://justgetflux.com/

I use Flux all the time. It has helped a tremendous amount with my work. I have to also remember to keep blinking.

Otherwise... I'm on Restasis twice a day & have double perm plugs. I'm also on a strict supplement routine and have revamped my diet (lots of fruits and vegges... I eat an apple, some cucumber, an orange, a banana, a ton of carrots, and a salad every day). I use REFRESH PLUS drops and Fresh Kote sometimes as well.

But it's never easy. I'm often asked to color correct my work on certain jobs, and that means I have to turn off flux and turn my monitor up to "normal" brightness, which HURTS. So I have to do that in spurts.

Ultimately, if I have to quit this job, I'll either go back to school for psychology (I'm 31) or try to open a bar (just need to find the money!). I should also mention I'm 31 and live in Southern California.

[Colin P]

I'm a 'mail delivery person' (or at least i was last time i checked) or Postman as it's known in the U.K.
And have had to change me hours, with fortunatly a good boss!. Getting up from half a nights sleep aint good!. Also sorting/prepping your delivery means being in a building with over a 100 people who work with heating on, and bright overhead lights causing glare, off all the hundreds of envelopes and everything else plastic under that roof. Once you're outside/on delivery HAPPY DAYS!!.. (remember that one, with the Fonz lol.. Heyyyyyy!!).
Therefore; i now start when everyone else is doing an Elvis, and leaving the building, my 'walk' is 'thrown up' for me, and i simply go in, turn both the light in my section and the heating off. Then get the hell out of there. Transitional glasses on, no-one mithering me, time for the feet to hit the street!..

[Colin P]

Anyone who's thinking of re-locating?. Head for the coast, it's more humid there. Sea air. If in the U.S? I hear the pacific North West is the place to be?. And definatly NOT! Utah OR New Mexico, Vegas etc. ..
I live in the North West of England 45 mins from coast- artificialy warmed by the carribean gulf stream,(warm waters) and surrounded by a wall of hills known as the pennines, which the cloud that forms at the coast cant get over, and makes my part of the world mostly overcast and threatening rain. The overcast conditions keep the temprature UP in the Winter weve had NO frost this winter so far. Minus -1 is the coldest ive seen it overnight!... The Overcast conditions STOP weeks of blazing U.V RAYS in the summer, get 2 days at a time at most, then a break, back to the heavy cloud. Temprature range over 12 months, is -1 or today +10 (December). Summer +20-22. No such thing as Air conditioning in our homes!! heating October-March when needed?...
Humidity 6 months of the year in the high 80's-90%. Lowest is 50% and that was an extreme! mid-day in July. Back upto 70+% overnight.
8am tomorrow for example (21/1/14) 98% Humidity...
Wales and Ireland by the coast, is more Humidity 95%+ with same temps..

WWW.bbc.co.uk/weather/

[DryInUpstateNY]

I live in Northeast (upstate NY) near the Adirondacks.

I'm a software programmer. In front of a computer a lot.

I'm aqueous deficient (no mgd). I take Restasis twice a day and have revamped my diet.

My biggest contributors to the dry eye are:
1. Stress. Flat out number 1 contributor. Stress will cause bad sleep pattern or no sleep and that just makes things 100x worse.
2. Forced air (air conditioning or heat... heat is by far worse).


I do following:
1. Restasis 2x a day.
2. Eat a mostly alkaline diet. Did so by going back to the diet I had as a kid (Mediterranean greek diet). I also try to be gluten free as if I do, I'll be eliminating bread, pasta, etc. Not a celiac's sufferer, but it's just a good practice. Getting rid of processed food, sugar, and milk also helped tremendously.
3. Exercise 3-4x a week very strenuously. High intensity (I wrestle and do grappling to stay in shape).
4. Humidifier next to my bed. Every morning I will steam my face for 10 minutes using the humidifier on my lap as the heat/steam source.
5. Drink 60-75% of my body weight in ounces (e.g. 200 lbs. person would drink 140oz. of water daily). It's a lot but I tell the difference.
6. Sleep at least 7 hours. If you don't sleep well, this will exacerbate the issue 100 fold. That's why Stress is the main contributor; because if you are stressed you don't sleep, and the negative feedback loop just puts you in a state of extreme depression and pain.
7. Allergy shots. I am allergic to dust pretty badly and w/ forced air it just makes things way worse. Right now I'm just at a maintenance and it's pre-emptive action to stop things happening before they can happen. No flare ups.

Currently I feel great. As long as the temperature stays above 20F I am good. As soon as it dips really low the forced heat is constant in every building you can imagine on full and that dries me out.

I have this issue all my life that actually helps w/ dry eye. Everytime I see numbers I need to perform math operation in my head such that I get to the root number (e.g. if I see 4:55 on a clock i'll add 4+5+5 to get 14 which is 1+4 which is 5). Everytime I do that now I've programmed myself to blink hard and often. Weird but it works. I also time my blinking to music when at work. I make sure to blink on a specific count; that way I'm subconsciously maintaining a good blink rate while on the computer at work. I also take a break every 20 to 30 minutes and walk around for 2min, wash face in restroom, and do a little breathing exercise before starting up again. this helps a lot. I had all the overhead lights removed from my office and the screen is on lowest brightness. this was a huge saver.

Quitting my job would leave my family in dire straits. Right now my eyes are at about 90% of what they were before dry eye happened. I feel pretty good and as long as I am vigilant w/ my actions to pre-emptively abate the triggers, I am in good shape. I'm afraid to stop the Restasis ever because I don't want to potentially relapse.

[DryInUpstateNY]

I should also mention that I caught the issue VERY early on and attacked it from all angles.

When an ophthalmologist told me to just use some drops, I went to a 2nd and 3rd opinion. All said aqueous deficient and one of them said to be very aggressive w/ hitting the inflammation. He gave me good info, prescribed Restasis immediately, even though my schirmer's were only low on one eye. The other eye was borderline.

I think in doing this early when most folks would just use drops saved me a lot of headache later on as the inflammation was caught early.

I will say that dry eye forced me to eat clean and get back in shape. I was about 70lbs. overweight, very stressed in life w/ work and probably from the fact that I was overweight and it was keeping me from reaching my potential in grappling. After dry eye, my focus became laser-like. Nothing was going to keep me from attacking the issue. Eating super clean and exercising were necessary because I convinced myself that it was the cause of the dry eye. I convinced myself if I didn't do it I would suffer badly.

I ended up losing 30lbs. in 2 months w/ diet alone. It made a huge difference. I feel it in my eyes.

I must state full disclosure that I also take HydroEye supplement. I don't know if it has helped so much as just generally fixing my lifestyle did, but I'm not changing ANYTHING that got me to where I am now, feeling "normal".

I went from using systane every 15minutes to just applying them as a "pre-emptive" measure right before bed time. Only 1x a day or so.

On the mental aspect and "spiritual" end, I attribute that to the working out hard and meditation and adopting an attitude of "I don't give a **** about the petty things". I stopped worrying about deadlines and how those who work for me are doing or the overall health of the projects. The work was there, I know I do great work, I'm worrying for nothing. All that worry didn't help any. I was working 50 to 60 hours a week 10 to 20 hours extra to be that machine I always was. I force myself to leave on time every day and don't work extra at all (there are few exceptions and they are rare but that's ok).

[Mawsky]

Hi, I work in a hospital which many would be surprised requires a lot of computer time, I spend most of my shift in fron of the screen! Also the constant airflow in the building, makes it worse. I work in a brand new hospital only three years old now, so the lighting is horrendous they had to change the can lights right over the nurses station because one of my coworkers was getting ocular migraines because of the LCD that actually have a unpercevable pulse to them, they put the new lights on a dimmer switch, which I turn all the way down. My eyes are always worse at work.

[Faith1989]

Props to you working in a hospital.. I don't know how you do it ! But that's awesome..