BLOG: The dry eye doc with dry eyes
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Man, my eyes hurt. It takes zero effort for me to empathize with my patients with dry eye disease.
Since as long as I can remember, I have had issues with dryness. Starting when I was a teenager wearing hard contact lenses (99.97% of my waking hours), my eyes vampire red every night out, all the way to my own pandemic screen overload like every other American during our lockdown, DED has been a burden. Heck, as I noted on a recent video collage produced by Sun Pharma on eye docs with dry eye, my one eye hurt so much in med school I talked a young assistant prof into doing an MS workup for me.
Negative, of course. It was “only” dry eye.
You don’t need to suffer from a common ailment covered by your specialty in order to be devoted to taking care of folks who do. There’s no requirement for a CT surgeon to have had her chest cracked, no badge of honor for that urologist who has suffered the indignity of a prostate gland biopsy. And thank heavens for that, you know? If I ever get cancer of any type whatsoever, I want my oncologist to be super healthy so that they are around for as long as I need them.
Still, when you are personally aware of something you cover in your daily practice, you have a quick and easy connection with your patients. Heck, when I used to take care of kids, more often the conversation about moving from wearing glasses to contact lenses was a breeze! I broke 12 pairs of glasses in 12 months playing basketball in the 7th grade. At the time, my Dad owned the factory that made my frames, and he still thought that was a ridiculous hoops “stat.” Off I went for my first contacts, my vision better, my eye comfort never the same.
Our return to the office after the government-dictated lockdown of nonessential practices was a welcome break for me. Like everyone else in the U.S., I’d been tethered to my laptop. Even though I knew how much this would cause my DED symptoms to worsen, there I was. My EMR screen time was actually a relief, a respite. Mark your calendars; that’s as close to a compliment that POS technology is ever getting here. But because of my most recent “up close and personal” encounter with dry eye symptoms, our clinic was ready for the onslaught that came on day 1 and hasn’t let up since.
I’m not really sure if it’s comforting to know that so many of my fellow dry eye docs are also people who have symptomatic DED. I feel as badly for every doctor featured on that Sun video as I do each of my patients in the clinic. What I can say for sure is that each one of us knows just how real DED is, and how significant a factor it can be as we go about the business of living.
Each patient encounter is just a bit more personal, you know?
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