Have you ever had those moments where your eyes are tearing up for some unknown reason, and no..it’s not because something flew into your eye, or because you have some kind of eye condition.
I first experienced this a couple of months ago when I was still living in China. I would have those moments when my eyes would suddenly tear up, and I’d have to dab at it with a tissue. Sometimes I would be tempted to actually scratch at the eye, because it felt like the problem was somewhere there. Even when I had moved back to Manila, I was still experiencing the same problem. It would happen at the office, or at home, and it was mostly inconvenient but bearable. But things changed drastically when my eye started tearing up as I was driving in my car one evening.
Earlier that evening I had dropped off some friends at the Makati area. I usually keep a box of tissue with me on the passenger seat, but as they had sat in my car they moved the tissue box to the back, which was a big problem when I was driving home. First it was nothing, and then suddenly one eye started tearing up….I could still sort of drive then. And then my other eye started tearing up too, and it was then that my vision started getting blurry and I could barely see the road. I couldn’t even reach one of the emergency bays, and I was along EDSA, so I tried to find a convenient place to stop for a moment (that was not in the middle of the road) and put my car on hazard mode. It took me a few minutes to grab at the back for the tissue box and dab at my eyes. When I was okay I started driving again.
What that moment told me was that I really had to have my eyes seen by a doctor. My mom had mentioned to me a few times that it might just be dry eyes, but I never took her seriously enough. I thought it was impossible I had dry eyes because I was the kind of person who cried a lot during movies, so my eyes always had some amount of “moisture”, but seeing as desperate times called for some desperate measures….
When I finally went to the doctor to have my eyes checked, she confirmed my mom’s suspicions. I had dry eyes. But even then, I didn’t really fully understand what having dry eyes meant, and what were the things to do to try and avoid getting them, and what was the treatment to it.