Looking for opinions, preferably informed, about whether I should schedule a second doctor’s appointment about this.
About three weeks ago I woke up with conjunctivitis in my left eye. It was red, watery, crusty. I had a head cold, and I get it sometimes when I have a head cold. No biggie. I threw away my eye makeup, contacts, and contact case, and wore glasses.
The redness cleared up by the next day, but a week later the eye was still gunking up overnight, and the inner corner was still swollen. So I saw a doctor. She gave me a course of sulfacetamide drops, which I used, and they didn’t help.
After about another week the eye hadn’t changed, so I figured maybe it was allergies. I started to wear contacts again. I wore them for three days with no problems. My eye even stopped crusting up overnight. Last night I began to take Claritin, hoping it would help my eye as well as persistent drainage and cough.
This morning both eyes were crusty, with swollen inner corners, and slightly pink conjunctiva. The pink color went away within an hour. They burn slightly, though.
Any thoughts on whether this is worthy of another doctor appointment? Or is it likely allergies, and I need to wait for the Claritin to kick in? Or is it likely something else?
There’s a bunck of different prescriptions for conjunctivitus. I’d go back to the doctor and get a prescrition for a different one since the first didn’t work.
If you get cruddy crusties with your conjunctivitis, it’s almost certainly bacterial, and that responds ver well to saline washes. Buy yourself a couple of bottles of sterile saline, and rinse your eyes out multiple times a day and give them a really good wash just before bedtime. Step up washing your hands as well, as often as you can think of it.
Thanks everybody. My eyes have no problem at all this morning, sooo… who knows. I’ll be diligent about cleaning them for a few days, and see what happens.
Sometimes this happens to me when I have a cold, and it seems to be germs migrating from the rest of my face into my eyes, and not my eyes actually being infected. I wash my face with antibacterial soap for a few days and use a saline rinse on my nose, and my eyes clear up.
IANAD, though, and the advice that maybe you just didn’t respond to the initial drops is sound. Did you use them as long as you were supposed to? When I have had them, they have been like oral antibiotics-- take for n days, even it the condition clears up before that. Did you use the drops for as long as you were directed, or did you stop as soon as the condition cleared up?