Question
Background: I'm 26 and female. I poked my eye two or three months ago in a play fight with my boyfriend. It hurt immediately, and I went to the ER the next day because it didn't get better. They said I had scratched my eye and gave me some hydrocodone for the pain and some eye drops, Gentamicin Sulfate. I kept using them until a couple of days after my eye seemed fine.
A few weeks after this, my eye started to hurt sporadically, but usually in the mornings. Recently, the past couple of weeks, it's begun to be almost every morning. I still have those drops, so I'll use one, and my eye feels back to normal within about 20 minutes. Sometimes I don't use the drops, and the pain still usually goes away within half an hour, but the drops seem to help.
My question is: Is this supposed to happen? Will it just take more time for my eye to heal? Or do I have to go back to the doctor? Thank you for your time!
Answer
I believe you have what is called recurrent erosion. This means that though your eye initially healed from the scratch at the superficial level, at the deeper levels the healing was incomplete. So every so often the top layer of cells on your cornea gets scratched again and you experience pain. If you could get the deeper layers to heal better, this would not happen so easily.
What I recommend is this - find a very thick lubricant drop - an artificial tear that is very thick. Celluvisc is one but there are many others. Put this drop in every night right before you go to bed. this will leave a layer of protection between the cornea that is trying to heal and the eyelid which sometimes sticks to it over night. When the lid sticks over night and you open your eye in the morning the top layer of cells, called the epithelium, pulls off with the eyelid. So the layer of lubricant should prevent this sticking. If you should wake up in the middle of the night, put in another drop of the thick lubricant. And in the morning use a lighter, thinner daytime lubricant as soon as you get up, and maybe several times throughout the day.
Do this every day for say the next six months and if you have no new recurrences of the pain, you can then probably stop. However, if despite religious use of the lubricant every night, you still wake up with pain, then yes, you will have to go back to the doctor for further treatment. Do not use the Gentamycin again without the approval of your doctor.
