This morning I thought I had gone too far with the self-experimentation – as I woke up and thought I had gone blind. Now, the back story to this and the surprising eye-opener.
As I have mentioned previously, throughout the whole COVID-19 situation, I have been watching, researching, trying to understand the stages of progression and the mechanisms of this virus and have been following the mainstream media as well as other sources to try to figure out what measures I can take personally to protect myself.
Naturally, I have taken note of the fact that COVID-19 spreads by air droplets and not only enters the body by the air we breath in, but can also enter via the eyes, hence the advice not to touch the face or rub the eyes. I also took note of the fact that ideally the PPE of front-line medical staff should include a visor to protect the eyes and that newborn babies in Bangkok were being discharged from hospital with mini-visors for protection.
In Singapore we are now all required to wear face masks when we leave our homes to go out for essential errands such as food-shopping in order to protect others, but as yet, eye-protection for self-protection has not been mandated. Don’t get me wrong, this is not something I would like to see made compulsory, but as a chronic (seldom nowadays) migraine sufferer, I am all too aware that my eyes are my body’s weak point.
Plus, since I turned 40, the muscles in my eyes have weakened to the extent that despite 20/20 vision on an eye test, I need to wear reading glasses with increasingly ‘stronger’ lenses to help my eyes adjust. Recently the progression of this ‘problem’ has been rather rapid, so I am perhaps hypersensitive when it comes to eye-health.
So, when I returned home yesterday from the weekly food forage (in our home, we are still working pretty much full-time albeit remotely online, so weekend food shopping remains the norm) with irritated, itchy eyes, having necessarily encountered more people than I had been ‘exposed’ to across the entire week, I decided to try out something new that I had heard about and prepared the week prior.
Over the years, I have been following the work of various physicians who think about healing in different dimensions, applying different scientific modalities to the discipline of medicine and helping their patients though various health crises. It just so happens that last week, in the course of sharing insights and experiences with COVID-19 (as well as past experience with similar outbreaks), one such physician whose expertise and intentions I have come to trust implicitly, touched upon the possibility of making your own eye drops.
Funnily enough, the envisaged contents of the eye drops was Cistus tea (from the herb Cistus Incanus) which was the tea I had taken with me on holiday at the very start of the outbreak to drink daily for it’s antiviral properties. Keen to try it, I made my own eye-drops from my tea.
A quick disclaimer here – IT IS NOT ADVISED TO TRY THIS AT HOME, the following is merely my OWN PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.
Yesterday, I decided to try out the eye-drops and put them in my eyes just before going to bed. There was a little stinging, but it soon subsided.
Then, this morning I woke up and thought I had gone too far and gone blind! When I opened my eyes this morning there was a thick milky film clouding my vision. At first, I panicked just a LITTLE, then I brushed over my eyes and noticed that there were large balls of crusty residue in the corners of my eyes. So I wiped them away and the thick milky film vanished – I could SEE normally again!!! PHEW, I breathed a sigh of relief, but then I got to wondering what had actually happened. Did my eyes detox? If so, what was it that came out? Later my eyelids were still irritated and itchy until I washed the crusty stuff off.
I then wondered if I could still see the black floaters in my eyes that had steadily be growing over the past couple of years. I could not see them anymore, but then again it is too early to tell, as I often don’t ‘see’ them for days – so watch this space. Whilst I would NOT RECOMMEND to try this, it is nevertheless an interesting personal observation.