Our Bodies Can Heal Themselves

I got dry eyes in March 2014. The progression of the condition was pretty rapid: in a few days or two weeks, there was difficulty in carrying out basic activities such as reading. As far as I know the cause of my condition was physical – using the eyes too much in too dry places with too few blinks. Then there were a few months of suffering – the thing that helped the most was oily eye drops, and I had to put in oily eye drops every few minutes while lying on my bed when reading something from my laptop. In December 2014, I received a pair of scleral lenses. At the time my optometrist told me that I could in theory wear the lens indefinitely, although people got new pairs of scleral lenses from time to time. The optometrist instructed me to fill my lenses with saline and store them dry overnight. The optometrist also instructed me to clean it every night and morning with CONTOPHARMA i-clean! Cleaner – this was in the UK and maybe this was something they prescribed in the UK.

For me, scleral lenses were a lifesaver. It was with the lens that I could function like “normal.” In my first few months with the scleral lens, I was not always right with what kind of solution I put in it. To my astonishment now, at the time I even filled the lens with multi-purpose contact lens solutions for a few months. At the end of every day after having worn my scleral lens with the multi-purpose contact lens solutions, my eyes were sore when I took out the lens. At the time I didn’t realize what was wrong until I figured out accidentally that I should have used sterile saline or other kinds of saline that the doctor recommended. Don’t emulate me on this. But I still marvel at the fact that no long-term damage seemed to have followed from my mistaken use of solutions to fill my lens with for a few months. Our bodies can heal themselves to an amazing degree – this is something I will come back to later.

There was once in 2015 that I accidentally hit my eye when my scleral lens in it. The lens did not break, but the edge of the lens became noticeably tighter than it was before the hit. I concluded that this was because the hit made the lens change its shape. After I spoke to my optometrist about it, they were surprised and said that this was impossible for the lens to change its shape. Now I still have the lens with me, and it is of course no longer important whether the lens actually changed shape. But it is just a fun and by-now harmless anecdote, I guess, about my experience as a young, POC patient in a foreign country. The optometrist was nice, although it was not always easy to let them believe me in everything.

Between December 2014 and at some point in 2024 I was literally wearing my scleral lens every day apart from perhaps just some days. Between 2014 and 2024 I have acquired two additional pairs of scleral lenses: so I have acquired three pairs in total. I accidentally lost one lens, so I still have five lenses. At some point – maybe around 2017 – a new phenomenon started to occur, namely, that occasionally my lens would get oily after a day with a kind of substance that would not come off with my regular contact lens cleaning solution, CONTOPHARMA i-clean! Cleaner. This was not some kind of long-term build-up, as far as I understood. Rather, it appeared rather quickly – after a day, it could appear while the day before that was totally normal. Why did the build-up happen? I don’t know but I noticed that if I put my lens in especially tightly in my eyes, there could be build-up, so a possible explanation is that physical irritation would lead to the emergence of build-up. Moreover, I noticed that when the weather was especially hot, build-up was also more likely. My explanation again is that the physical irritation of heat stimulated the secretion of something that built up on my lens. But still, there were instances where there was no clear cause of the build-up but the build-up still happened. So it is not clear to me how to avoid build-ups in all cases. In any way, to solve the build-up, I used Menicon’s Progent A and B. Nobody told me to use Progent A and B to remove the oily stuff, I just figured it out myself. It worked for me. 

With the scleral lens, I limited some activities that I participated in. I did not travel to places where I thought there could be no good hygiene for handling the lens. I did not swim. Sometimes when there were discharges from my eyes at the end of the day after I wore the lens all day, I made sure to come home early so that others did not see the discharges (for some time I was too scared of possible eye infections that I didn’t even wipe my eyes with tissues in public – I thought the tissues were potentially unclean. But that was just what I thought at the time). That’s as much limitations as I had on my activities with scleral lenses. With scleral lenses, I was able to do the vast majority of things that I wanted to do. It was great. 

At some point in 2024, I stopped wearing scleral lenses. This was not because I thought my dry eyes got any better but because I was sick with long covid at the time and long covid made it tiring for me to put in and take out the scleral lens every day. Therefore, I got a pair of eyeglasses. At first, I found that my eyes were still very dry. Then somehow I started to realize that my eyes were not that dry anymore and I could just use my eyes without scleral lenses. There was still some irritation from the dryness, but not of a debilitating kind. I still don’t understand what exactly happened, but as of now I have not been wearing scleral lenses or using eye drops of any kind for more than six months at least. I have been working on my laptop and I do this without being impeded by dry eyes, which I still have.

Was this a spontaneous convalescence, or at least improvement, of the dry eyes condition? I think so. Why did this happen? It is not clear to me. I was coping with another long term condition, long covid, in 2024, and long covid caused some havoc in my neurological systems. As I was healing myself from long covid, maybe my dry eye condition was also healed as my neurological systems improved? This is possible. It is also possible that as I learned to calm down better, my eyes began to be not so dry – I learned from a doctor that the parasympathetic nerve – the nerve responsible for calmness – stimulates the secretion of tears. So the more anxious one is, the dryer their eyes; the calmer one is, the moister their eyes. By the way, because of long covid, I have also been very anti-inflammatory in my diet – no gluten, no refined carbs, no seed oils, proper amount of omega-3-rich food, eating only one or two meals a day and doing intermittent fasting, controlling my weight, etc. Tuning down inflammation, I read, also helps with dry eyes. Our bodies can heal themselves! Now I have recovered from long covid and now I no longer use anything, including scleral lenses, for my dry eyes. When I was first suffering from long covid I never thought that this experience would enable me to be free from scleral lens, at least for now. However, this is where I am. I am in my late 20s now, so still pretty young. I am happy with my eyes now – still feeling dry but not painful, not impeding my daily functions. Who knows what will come after? Come what may, I am confident that I can always find a way to cope. Life is like a box of chocolate for us who watched Forrest Gump. You never know what happens next and take everything with gratitude, even the suffering.

Paul