Allergies: Tis the Season

It’s that time of year when everything is more green outside and all the trees are opening their buds, the flowers are in full bloom, and the grass seems to grow an inch every day.  It’s so exciting that we all want to put on our flip-flops or running shoes and get to the great outdoors.

Unfortunately for many of us the plants blooming and our getting outside more is a recipe for allergies.  We go outside and start mowing the lawn and boom! suddenly we feel like we got something in our eye and it starts to itch and get red.  Sometimes the white portion of our eye (conjunctiva) becomes so swollen that it protrudes between our lids when we close the eye.

When this happens it is best not to rub your eyes but grab a cool clean washcloth and put it on the eye to relieve the itching sensation. If you have hayfever symptoms such as scratchy runny nose or scratchy roof of your mouth you may want to go to your nearest pharmacy and get an oral antihistamine. Just remember that many of these drugs can make you quite drowsy and they do make your eyes more dry. If your symptoms are solely related to your eyes then you may choose an over the counter vasoconstrictor eye drop such as Vasocon A, Naphcon A, or Opcon A. While these drops do tend to help the symptoms they can with frequent use cause growth of the blood vessels on your eyes causing a more permanent red eye. I prefer an antihistamine eye drop such as Pataday, Patanol, Elestat, Zaditor, or Bepreve. These drops do require a prescription so you will nee to see a physician first. We at Davis Vision Center are always happy to see you to help you or your family member out with this.

So the next time you start to itch remember the above.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 at 2:32 pm and is filed under utah lasik. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.