Eye pain?? Anyone else in the world?!


Question:

Eye pain?? Anyone else in the world?

I wore hard contacts from age 13-28. That was before they had "Gas permeable" lenses. My eyes were super dry, but no one seemed to care. Over the years my left eye bothered me. My opthamologist told me to use artificial tears. That helped a little. By age 28, I couldn't wear the lenses anymore. The pain was too extreme. It felt like a hot branding iron on my eyeball. So at least I could pop the contact out. An opthamologist told me I was a perfect candidate for "radial keratotomy." (That was before Lasik.) So I had the RK. Since that day (22 years ago) my left eye hurts just as if I had a contact in. After going to 60 doctors around the country, it was agreed that pain medication was the only thing that would help my "optic neuralgia." So I've been on Morphine and Codeine for years now. The pain is under control. Anyone ever hear of anything similar? Thank you.

Additional Details

1 month ago
I asked this question yesterday, and clicked a "Best Answer" totally by mistake. Sorry about that.


Answers:

When RK was done, radial, like the spokes of a wheel, incisions are made in the cornea down to a certain depth. The number of cuts made was determined by the amount of flattening of the cornea the surgeon was attempting to adjust. So the surgery you had, basically cutting the cornea in 8 to 12 radial areas (like a clock), sparing the central cornea, may have caused the surface of your cornea slightly irregular. And these cuts are 95% of the corneal thickness!

It'd be like taking a cake before you put the icing on it, and making cuts, then wanting the areas around the cuts to be perfectly flat. Most of the time it worked. Some of the time, like you, it didn't.

So, your irregular surface causes pain because when your lid slides over the cornea, it causes a slight tearing of the epithelial surface and you have pain. I'm not sure the pain is the type that morphine would be good for, cuz then you are just stoned all the time. Yes the pain is less, but life is less too. Makes everything numb.

Not being a CORNEA specialist, I'm not going to tell you what surgery you'd need to repair this. It would seem that the PRK or the WAVEFRONT types of surgeries now performed for myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, etc., as it uses the energy of the different types of lasers to basically evaporate tissue, and thus change the shape of the cornea, could be used therapeutically to resurface your cornea(s) so that whey you re-epithelialize that area, it would become spherically smooth. But then you'd be cutting on little slices of corneal pie, and those wounds don't heal so well being inside the corneal structure. So it might be 'dangerous' to attempt this, I'm not sure. Recently in Medscape Medical News the CustomCornea LASIK Algorithms for Myopia were recalled because the results left some eyes irrepairably damaged and contacts nor glasses could correct for it. OUCH!

It seems that when your lid comes crashing down over your corneas, when you blink, if there was some type of surgery that would smooth this out, the lid would then not hit any microscopic edge, and you wouldn't have pain any different than a 'normal' person.

I'd imagine that artificial tears have also been suggested. The one's that would seem to work best, would be those that lubricate...the longer chained molecules, like vaseline vs. baby oil, would be the better choice. Soooooo try celluvisc which does make things a bit blurry, but it'll sure make your eyes feel better. There are other 'thicker' ones too like Refresh PM. Most people BLINK their drops out by squeezing. They become FACE drops, which somehow just don't make the eye any better.




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