My eyes are bothering me again. The weather has turned stormy, and whenever we have strong wind, my Dry Eye Syndrome worsens. Whenever we have a dry spell, my Dry Eye Syndrome worsens. In fact, most of the weather extremes we have in the UK affect my eye condition one way or the other. Mostly I just don’t make enough natural tears to protect my eyes, and I keep pulling out my eyelashes because they hurt. I have congenital distichiasis (ingrowing eyelashes).

Pain has been a part of me for all my life. As a child I endured many medical procedures to remove ingrowing eyelashes, and as an adult they continued, along with some experimental surgery. The most extreme of these was eyelid rotation surgery on both eyes, that I had approximately ten years ago. During the time since then I have been diagnosed with blepharitis and loads of other random eye complaints that I can’t even pronounce. Every time I visit the  Manchester Royal Eye Hospital for a check-up, the doctor will mention something new, or something I haven’t been informed about before. I am a medical mystery. And it hurts.

Prepped for surgery

Some days the pain is so intense that I want to rip my eyes from their sockets just to make it stop. Other days I can barely keep my eye open because an eyelash is scratching the cornea, or my scars are inflamed, or something else is bothering me but I have no idea what it is. My vision will sometimes blur even after I use eye drops to try and soothe the pain. And I use ointment every night, because if I don’t, my eyelids would stick together with crusty stuff and it would be even more painful to wake up with. Instead I wake up with a greasy face, unless all the ointment has been sucked into my skin overnight. I am a glamorous woman!

Bruised after laser treatment

The only thing that has helped relieve my pain in recent years is meditation, and more specifically, reiki energy healing. I have read stories about people who managed to cure their illness or disorder with energy healing, but so far that hasn’t happened to me. I went through a period of anger and unhappiness about this fact, until I realised that there is so much more to these situations. My condition is genetic. I was born with it, but I was only diagnosed at around the age of 2 when my brother presented with the same symptoms and my mum battled doctors to get some answers. Since then, I have only been treated to the best of medical science at a given time. This spans through the 1980s, 90s, 00s and to the present day. I have seen an increase in treatment options and products to help alleviate my eye pain during the past ten years.

Learning to work with reiki healing energy has helped to give me some perspective on my health. Outwardly I seem healthy and normal. You might wonder why I wear sunglasses in winter, or why I walk round the supermarket wearing them sometimes (I am super sensitive to light), but otherwise I appear normal. The doctors never made a fuss about my condition, and I never let it affect my lifestyle. I learned to drive, I worked full time jobs, I am now a writer by profession, and I learned to work through the eye pain. Reiki helps me to relax, it calms my mind when the pain is particularly bad, and it offers a distraction from the physical disorder of my body. Reiki takes my mind and my spirit to another plane, where I feel nothing, and I don’t have to consciously think about anything. That is how it helps me. Thank you, reiki, and thank you, Great Spirit, for your support and guidance in an often-painful human world.

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