Wars of Rosacea

I haven't blogged since Christmas, and that's because I've had a recurring problem with using screens. The glare is awful. Apparently my ocular rosacea flares up when it's very cold, and so as soon as we got back from Texas and the temperature plunged, my rosacea went nuts. What happens to me is that the oils in my tear glands are blocked in from the inflammation, and so the oil parts never get into the tears (I can now testify that they are very important). As a result, I wake up crying projectively and have to force drops into my eyes to hydrate them properly. Repeat every hour or so, all night. It takes about 2 days for my eyesight to recover in that eye, and a few more for screens to be comfortable.

The first week this happened, I had three flare-ups in a week and then one of my corneas got over-wet and exploded (it's like a waterbed; too much water in between the cornea and the basement membrane and boom!). Since that has happened once before, I had a pretty good idea what had happened and hauled into the opthamologist's office and he cleaned it up for me. (First time he took dead tissue of of my eye with tweezers, horror movie. Second time, eh. I guess it all depends what you're used to. Personally, I am tired of the receptionists knowing my name.) So now I'm on drugs but still had a couple flare-ups this week. Jim got me a pirate patch just in case. Saw the uber-specialist again today and he put a contact lens bandaid in my eye (preemptively? he doesn't say much, but the last flareup might have caused a bit of a fissure, too). In three weeks we'll see how much better I am.

Humph. Now you know why there's precious little news coming out of this house. But the drugs are helping and the weather is warming, so soon I'll update on New Year's and etc.