BLINK
This was my eye last week. At first I thought maybe it was a stye, but it didn't look like one. It hurt like hell every time I blinked.
A trip to the doctor won me the diagnosis of "blepharitis." I received an antibiotic ointment to take each night before bed for 14 days. (i'm still taking it.)
So WTF is Blepharitis?
I could provide you with over one thousand different definitions. But my favorite definition of the disease comes from this book:
Published in 1891, here's how Henry C. Angell M.D. describes Blepharitis...
This definition roasted me, stole my girlfriend, and gave me a wedgie. Let's go line by line.
BLEPHARITIS, OR OPTHALMIA TARSI, IS a follicular inflammation of the edges of the lids, which are red and swollen.
Yep. This is how it started for me. Red, inflamed, edge of eyelid.
Excessive secretion from the follicles of the cilia produces a morning agglutination of the lids in the beginning...This checks out too. Woke up with eye more and more boogies each day.
...and later, in severe cases, the secretion becoming purulent, there are pustules and superficial ulceration...
By day 3 of this mess I too had "purulent" (fucking painful and worrisome) crusties in the corner of my eye. At one point I googled in a panicked state, "cold sore but on eyelid???" because that's what it felt like. I think that might have been the "superficial ulceration." But wait, it gets worse!
...the cilia fall out, the tarsal border becomes thickened and rounded, the lids are crusted, the puneta lachrymalia no longer catch the tears, and the excoriation and irritation of the edge of the lids are kept up by their constant overflow.
Yeah that was me at the worst stage of it. I had eyelashes pointing every which way and falling out and it hurt so much. I told the nurse, "it hurts to uh...look around..?" She laughed.
The cause of the affection in mild cases may be over-use of the eyes, especially in an unwholesome atmosphere...
Oof. And the roast begins. This also checks out, as the day before I'd started to have symptoms, I was wiping away one hundred years of dust and mold at my old apartment hoping to take back a security deposit.
Severe cases occur mostly in ill-fed and ill-housed scrofulous subjects, and often as a sequence of ophthalmia scrofulosa, or of exanthematous fever.
Hey! I eat every day! And don't call me scrofulous! YOU'RE scrofulous, okay? And I definitely like...know what scrofulous...means...
WOW. RUDE.
Oh. Almost forgot this book was from the 1890s. Anyway.
It's funny, last week wasn't actually my first run in with blepharitis. In 2020 I took on a job as an optometry tech for like 6 months. My first and last foray into health care.
But back then I couldn't spell it.