First I’m on the end of my contact lenses, need to order some—went to Fencon on just about the last of my lenses, didn’t take a spare—now, understand, I can see far off just fine without glasses or contacts. I CAN drive without glasses or contacts. I cannot, however, accurately recognize people who walk up to me, or read a name badge. So losing the lenses would be a pita. But—I didn’t want to use my last lenses until I had time to order a replacement.
So—on the way out, a 2 night and 3 day drive, we hit the smoke most of the way. My eyes start burning. I flood them every chance I get. At the con, the right eye is dryer than the left, or not so comfy. I go on flooding it. It’s Texas: I’m allergic to everything in the American southwest.
Three days with my brother, and still the irritation in the right eye. I figure it’ll get better once we go north. We hit the road, and have a good drive—up to Billings, where we run into the smoke again. Jane’s sick and allergified, and too tired, and I’m wired for sound. I pretty well drove home the last day, through the smoke. We get to bed, we wake up, the eye is still giving me fits, but I delay one day trying to deal with the problem—these are, should you wonder, extended-wear, so a week is good, two weeks is really pushing it.
And that’s the day I come down sick, really sick, and coughing, and one very bad, epic bad, cough causes that eye to go really, really red. I know it’s got to come off, but it’s sore, I can’t see, I’m coughing and wheezing, and I can’t get the damn lens off. It’s on for the duration of the ghastly crud.
Bad me. When I can get the thing off, it requires showering it off, and by now the eye is really offended, sore, Lord! really sore, and I figure eyedrops and sleep will solve it.
Not. Ok. We leave the lenses off a couple of days.
It gets worse. This is the point at which I know I’ve got to go in and get it seen to, but the doc isn’t in on Sunday. Monday—I go over to Walmart (the best doctors in the area) and ask if they can take a look.
A 61 dollar prescription later, of which Medicare pays 1 munificent dollar, I have the med, and head for the car while Jane pays out. Nearly got hit by a speeder and I’m in too much pain to care, after all the testing and an hour trying to get that prescription filled (new customer there, for the pharmacy). The med, finally, brings a little relief.
By evening, the redness is gone. This morning, it’s doing really well. So it’ll be the 18th before I can wear my contacts again, but that’s all ok—the pain has finally stopped. And I’ve been living with that a while.
I know, I know, stu-pid. I should have pulled those contacts back when. I think I had that little bacterial infection from the irritation we were getting here from the smoke, even before we left on the trip: a contact can act like a Bandaid, and keep the eye protected; but after a certain point, it was a pretty dirty bandage, and it was stuck, which took a real painful effort to get off.
So, so glad for the doc. It’s a lot easier to work when tears aren’t streaming down your face.
OW OW OW … how awful – I kind of know how you felt – I thought I had an infection with a cough recently, tried antibiotic cream – so many tears it got into my tummy and made me throw up – back to the surgery – dr looked for foreign body she was convinced was there, as only clear tears and lots of blinking – she was right – she couldn’t find it, but she had got rid of it – what a relief … trying to work on the computer was murder – 5 days that very very tiny thing was in my eye ..
so glad you didn’t do any permanent damage – eyes are scary when they go wrong ..
Oh, I can sooooo relate, CJ! I’ve worn contacts since the early 70’s, starting with those horrible hard ones. As I have gotten older, my eyes have gotten a lot drier and the contacts started to become less comfortable. Finally I started getting eye infections, but like you, I kept my lenses in which did in fact protect my eye, the doc said.
I tried managing the infections with goldenseal, because they were bacterial, but it took a lot to get a systemic style method to work on such a small localized area. My body would reach overload on goldenseal before it could help much with the infection, so I finally did go to the doc on this and he gave me some drops. He also said I would probably need those tear duct plugs to help keep my eyes moist.
Unfortunately, the infection kept coming back and I kept using the drops (with the doc pressuring me to get the tear duct plugs) until I started noticing that my achilles tendons were starting to get really sensitive. I could tell that if I were to stress them, I could have easily damaged or pulled them. I then read the warnings (of which there were plenty) and one of the ‘side effects’ was that it could rupture tendons. Yah. An eye drop, rupturing tendons. Oh, greedy 1%.
Anyway, I decided I needed a better solution than tendon rupturing eye drops and plugging up my tear ducts. I popped by Super Supplements and found this herbal eye wash that had rue, fennel, and goldenseal in it, that actually worked better than the eye drops and my achilles tendons started to relax, but still the infection kept coming back.
So I did more research on line and this time, ran across a post by somebody that said put a tiny bit of olive oil on your finger and dab it on the edge of the bottom eye lid and blink to spread it around the eye, to re-moisten the eye and restore the natural moisture barrier that gets lost as the eyes get older and drier.
Ok, it seemed a bit weird, but it was easy to do (I even had a bottle sitting around), and I was pretty sure a dab of olive oil in the eye wouldn’t be harmful, so I gave it a try. And what do you know? My eye infections stopped almost immediately, and wearing my contact lenses is again so comfortable I don’t remember I have them in, half the time.
Now, once a month or so, I take the lenses out just before bed, put the olive oil on my eyelid to soak in overnight, then get up next morning, take a shower and then put my lenses back in. The olive oil is absorbed by then and it doesn’t gum up my lenses. All I know is, Thank GOD that I didn’t have to use big pharma’s ‘fix’ and then have to resort to their intrusive and expensive solution which wouldn’t have solved the loss of the moisture barrier problem anyway! (To say nothing of the possibility of needing surgery for a ruptured tendon!)
So, once again, big pharma’s solutions are only meant to make things temporarily ‘fixed’ so that you have to keep coming back and coming back and then they do things like far more expensive intervention stuff like tear drop plugs, all the while, never ever mentioning something as easy as putting a tiny dab of olive oil on your eyelid every now and again. Just like they never mention that you can do a liver flush and avoid having your gall badder removed. They are not our friends.
True, the local level physician isn’t really at fault. It is the big pharma-funded ‘medical schools’ who purposefully omit such information and poo-hoo anyone who brings it up in class, pushing instead for their students to believe that only ‘modern’ medicine (aka big pharma drugs) are capable of solving the health problems of their soon to be patients; that any herbal/natural solutions are just snake oil and quackery. Some docs manage to overcome that bias, but most are fully invested in believing and acting on the highly biased big pharma based ‘information’.
Plus, big pharma reps give the doctors monetary kickbacks for using and prescribing their drugs. Had a friend who worked in a doc’s office and accidentally overheard the rep and doc talking about that, so I know it isn’t just TV drama storyline stuff. It really happens.
I’m a great believer in olive oil, all over. The ancients used it to seal wounds, to relieve dry skin, cooked with it: gentlemen and ladies never bathed without their oil flask handy. Athena’s gift to Athens was a real panacea for the ailments of the sunny Med. It’s sweet oil for an earache, will remove calluses, soothe irritation and blisters, help heal burns, and restores the youthful skin tone we lose as we age. As a cooking oil, it’s about the healthiest you can get, it tastes great with balsamic vinegar as a salad oil, and it also will relieve dry hair, dry nasal passages, cure hangnails, and ease an iffy stomach. Willow bark, salt, olive oil, wine and vinegar, are some natural curatives that the Med bestowed on its civilizations that just made life so much nicer.
Back in Grad School (way back in the last century) I started getting repeated styes – infirmary did the ointment thing which got tiresome. Then one of my fellow students observed that I was spending a lot of time in the library, and told me that it could be a response to all the florescent lighting, and that vitamin A would help. Boy did it ever. Many years later the same thing happened, when I was again spending hours under florescents, again the vitamin A did the trick.
Now that there are so many of the energy saver bulbs around, I realised that my eyes were getting a little irritated, and have started supplementing. Not every day as it can build up to toxic levels, but once or twice a week. It does seem to help.
Oh no, that cough = redness…. on my way back from London last year I had a small coughing fit on the plane. Small fit but big coughs. Excused myself to the loo and bam! It was like I’d ruptured just about every capillary in my eye. First time it had ever happened. Scared the life out of me! So glad that you’re feeling better.
Re the olive oil… much better than commercial hand creams which all have, petroleum in them. I use honey for most cuts and scrapes but have used olive oil. the only thing I don’t use it on is a new tat. Which reminds me, I need to design something new…
Knew there was a good reason for sticking with glasses! Touch my eyeball? Surely you jest.
Between my very steep astigmatism and my infernal allergies, I have never worn contact lenses. I am stuck with the old “box on the face” glasses.
I hope your eyes get better soon.
I know what you mean, my allergies used to be so bad you wanted to take to your eyes with a Brillo pad! This started about the same time I began to need glasses, so contacts were never on my want list, especially since my primary problem is astigmatism. I don’t like putting things in my eyes, even drops, and DH is the same, so contacts for both of us are right out.
Do you have an emergency pair of glasses you can use in case of contacts going blooey?
Several, nicely gradated.
The ability to touch your eyes is something I had to cultivate young: eye surgery at 10, several impact wounds (about 14, and a dozie at about 40—when I had to have a cornea tacked back into place (rather like aerating a lawn) as an office procedure. Numerous eye infections that had nothing to do with contacts, and a few that did. I am very happy to have pretty good vision after all that. It’s really more a mental thing: you just have to practice getting a sanitary finger near your eye while looking at it, and doing it often enough that you’re comfortable with it. Sanitary is the operative word. There are few things about eyes that hurt quite as quickly and nastily as cat-hair under a contact. 😉
I have ‘special eyes,’ as in the commercial [lol]. I have a child’s curvature to the iris, very steep, which means that bifocals don’t work for me on 2 grounds—a) that I have a torque in my astigmatism: the numbers warp, and it apparently makes me have to ‘pick a range of focus’ in an unusual sense. Plus, my face is so flat, except my nose, that I have nearly an inverse slant past the jaw—meaning that if you try to put a bifocal area on my glasses, it bisects my natural angle of vision, or it is relegated to the extreme bottom of the lens, which requires an actually painful effort of downward focus to use—and the same thing with the bifocal contacts I wear. They’re ok if I have to look at a pill bottle to tell whether it’s my pills or Jane’s—hers are stronger than mine, and some things I don’t take—but I can’t sustain that muscular effort to keep my focus downward. Plus it gives my face a funny look. So for me glasses are multiple—literally a pair for every 10″ of focus—in the near range, nothing that helps me see the faces of people I meet, and nothing at all needed to see a sparrow perched in a tall tree. The only part of my distance vision that has gone with age, alas, is my ability to pick out the stars clearly or to see fine features on the moon. But I had it for years, so that’s not to regret. Most people never have it. And the contacts enable me to see people at conversational range, while not interfering with my distance vision, which is just a real bennie. 😉
I’m nearsighted to the degree that everything I’ve done till now has been small scale… anything more than half a room away was a blur…with a touch of astigmatism. I’d be a fair candidate for contacts except I get pinkeye/conjunctivitis if I even SEE a toddler across said room, no joke. So my hands and other things stay OUT of my eyes as much as possible.
Home remedies vs Big Pharma: They’ll sell you $$ pills that’ll fix that toenail fungus AND damage your liver, no extra charge, or you can clean and pack the area with Vicks Vaporub daily until the nail grows out. Turns out all those aromatic oils are also antifungal. Who knew?
For foot injuries: Epsom salts, strongly concentrated, hot, and soaking an hour an evening. Back in the day, when doctors were a bit looser in practice, my little brother had a run-in with a rusty garden spade, took a deep dig between two tendons of his foot, topside—you could see the tendons; and come evening, red lines were running up his leg. Go to an ER? You didn’t do that in that day and age. We called the doc at home, told him we were using Epsom salts, and he said keep it up all night. So nobody got much sleep. It was kept continually supersaturated and hot, and by about midnight the redness had retreated—it had gotten to his knee. So we just kept soaking it, and that was the treatment we used. He’s still got a triangular scar there. Nowadays he’d be days in hospital with iv’s, likely. But Epsom salts is a pretty unfriendly environment for inflammations, and it is good for a minor trouble. If you run into a rusty shovel—by all means, go to the ER. Tetanus is not something to fight with a bucket of salts.
Since the two major ingredients are Magnesium and Sulfur, yeah, it’s good for what ails ya. Good double-blind studies have also shown you can absorb “clinically significant” amounts of both components via the skin, either in a soaking bath or a soaked bandage with the salts in between layers of bandage. Keep it wet to the skin.
On another health note: Was just reading an article in a back issue of Discover that they have ‘discovered’ that taking healthy gut flora and ‘transplanting’ it to individuals with various gut issues, especially C. difficile (a VERY nasty antibiotic resistant gut bug), IBS, and even Crohn’s disease all benefit. In the case of C. difficile, relief is gained within a day. Everybody’s all excited about it and they’re running a double blind study to ‘prove’ it so it can be declared an official treatment. Now, the first record of this procedure being done was back in ’58 so I guess they never figured out how to make a pill out of it that they could patent and sell, and have to settle for a simple non-surgical procedure.
Interesting they never talk too much about extraction of “healthy gut flora”. 😉 It’s also used for disease prevention, salmonellosis in day-old chicks, et al, under the name of “competitive exclusion”.
I dare say the hot water helped as much as anything. I often get little nicks on my hands, but hand washing with hot water from the tap, as I do normally several times a day, sometimes with extra “rinsing” of the injury for half a minute, gets them healed in a few days. Heat kills bacteria too, and it seems to be harder for them to develop “immunity” from. They seem to be able to adapt to “chemical warfare” better. Probably meet it more often.
THe bacteria that love to flourish in open cuts are also not going to be too happy in an overdose of magnesium and sulphur (magnesium sulphate) —there are strains that would be; but those two are pretty good at sucking moisture out of human tissue, and probably at ‘sploding bacteria that work similarly.