At the age of 40 I've just had to take a decision that I didn't expect to have to take until for at least 20 years: I've just had to stop driving at night. Weird don't you think? Weirder still, I don't even wear glasses!
Whilst I haven't had an accident or caused any trouble, it has become increasingly clear to me over the past 5 years or so that my night vision was deteriorating. This happens particularly when I'm driving, not generally - I can see perfectly well over a good distance if I'm standing in a field, but if it's dark and there are bright lights shining towards me (e.g. in a car on a road with oncoming traffic), I just can't see properly - it's like the whole area of my vision "whites out" and I'm momentarily blinded.
Annoying huh? not too much of a problem when you're walking about, but if you're in a car and having to remember where the road went because you can't see it - that's a problem.
I also lost a cornea about 18 months ago for no apparent reason - no underlying causes (or so I thought), no family history, no history of any eye problem at all (don't worry, it grew back, but not before I had 48 hrs of excruciating pain and a lot of eye specialists going "hmmmmmmm").
Well all of this is just tremendous bad luck isn't it? but then I found out:
this is all down to the hormone imbalances which cause my other problems and most particularly my PCOS!
Did anyone else know this? Clearly, doctors don't.
Throughout a woman's monthly cycle, the thickness of the cornea and its shape change. This happens in all women, even those with totally balanced hormones. We also know that cornea health and shape is affected by pregnancy - again, down to hormone changes. Thus, it should therefore be unsurprising to discover that in a woman with hormone imbalance, these changes can be more pronounced or become a problem (as in my case).
It's also the case that women, as they get older and go past menopause, can develop the opposite - so the spherical lens becomes flatter than it should be, due to hormone deficiency.
Secondly, dry eyes are far more common in women than in men and this is what leads to corneal distrophy (where the cornea breaks down, or in my case, just falls off one Monday afternoon as a cunning diversion from my day job!). Until this happened I had absolutely no idea that I had dry eyes or that there was anything wrong with them whatsoever. No-one knew. Luckily for me it grew back perfectly (although still pointy) and I went back to normal, but occasionally, and with no prior warning, my eye will start to run and sting (as it does if you manage to get moisturiser or sun tan lotion in it) and I have to shove some drops in to make it go back to normal. I have no idea whether it will break down again or whether these minor irritations are actually related - maybe they're mini-breakdowns which my body is able to fix.
The Good News
So all that sounds pretty worrying doesn't it? Well yes it does, but it turns out that opthalmology has known about this for years. A quick google search will show you thousands of articles about eyes and vision detailing the above.
The great news is that they all also say that correcting the hormone imbalance will also correct the astigmatism and cause dry-eyes to go back to normal. How cool is that?
I'd love to hear from you if you have vision problems or astigmatism as I do, especially if it's developed in your adult life and not just something you were born with. My suspicion is that this is yet another of these symptoms which get pushed under the carpet, ignored as irrelevant or dismissed as entirely unrelated.
It's clear to me that this is part of hormone imbalance, and whether you believe that the hormone imbalance causes the PCOS (as I do), or that PCOS causes the hormone imbalance is immaterial. The fact is that knowledge is power and simply knowing that the hormone imbalance can cause this issue puts us far further ahead in actually fixing it.
Let me know what you think. I'd love to hear your comments.
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