A nursery school teacher in, Brazil, Laura Ponce, suffers from
a rare ailment that causes her to cry ‘crystal’ tears. It starts off as soft
blobs inside her eyes, later solidifies when she blinks to take it out which results
in solid white crystals.
This she says happens to her for weeks, with a new plaque once
she expels another. It so bad she takes time off work at times, to remove as
much as 30 plaque membranes from her eye in a day. Laura said: “A clot starts to swell then I have to open
my eye to take out the membrane,” she explained. “When it dries it hardens, it
gets really hard, it hurts a lot.”
This issue according to Ponce was first noticed since she was 15
years old when her eyes were filled with an unknown white substance. Terrified,
she called her mother immediately, Marissa, who found the problem horrifying. Efforts
were made to remove the hard plaques from her already swollen eye socket, but
it kept forming. Marissa had this to
say: “We took it out and I was scared, we
ran to the ER and the doctor on duty also got scared. The doctor was
mystified.”
Ponce, now 35, has never been able to find a cure. She has
experienced an episode every few months since then, but no one has been able to
explain the mysterious ailment. Marissa says 35-year old Ponce has not gotten a
cure for the terrifying ailment while she still experiences at least an episode
every few month. “The whole family was shaken, we went chasing
doctor after doctor.”
Ponce recounting her ordeal said, “I’m a nursery school teacher, I get angry about not being able to
work. Two years ago it was infected for six months and I was taking 30 membranes
out of my eye each day.”
Dr Raul Goncalves, who is an ophthalmologist at Hospital de
Olhos de Bauru, is currently in charge of Ponce’s case Brazil. While explaining
the strangeness of her ailment said: “I
have been an ophthalmologist for 25 years and I have never seen anything like
it. For these plaques to form so fast there could be only one explanation, it
must be chemical. Every time you blink, you’re lubricating your eye, and tears
are made of three layers – a water layer, a mucin layer, and a fat layer. Each
cell separately creates a product and when you blink you mix all this like a
dough.”
In his opinion, Dr Raul’s feels her eyes are forced to be
protected by itself, hence the production of a other line of defence. In his
words: “The cornea jumps into action, and in Miss Ponce’s case the cornea’s
surface can secrete keratin. This keratin together with other components causes
the tear crystallization.”
To counter the problem, Dr. Raul prescribed silver nitrate eye
drops, to combat the problem and it seem to have provided her relief as Ponce
now experiences fewer infections and is able to go back to work.
Excited about the development she said: “My expectation are for my eyes to be cured and for everything to be
fine.”
Source: Oddity central
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