Best Miracle Drug Ever is OTC and under $10 for 2 Months Worth

Is anyone else shocked that no medical professionals knew about it?

Not my eye, but a good look-a-like most days

So who would like to go to work looking like this most days? I see no raised hands. Who would want to go anywhere looking like you might be stoned, or your dog just died -I know what that looks like :(

Over the past several years I've been having dry red burning eyes to some extent. I decided to bring it up to my doctor about 2 and 1/2 years ago. I got a prescription for an Rx eye drop that didn't do much of anything but charge my insurance a whole lot. I gave up on it and suffered pretty much daily. The only times that were a little better were on the weekends if we kept the house closed up with the hepa filter on the heating/cooling system. I love spring with the windows open at night, but Kyle and I have not been able to enjoy that for a few years. The house is almost always sealed. I have seasonal allergies, allergies to smoke (wood burning stoves are abundant in my neighborhood) mold, and of course pets.

Work has always been bad. I work in a huge warehouse. Parts of the office are in more office-like settings, but my offices have been annexed to the warehouse with tons of boxes. think something like this:

O.K., maybe on a smaller scale. 

A typical morning for me at work is to get the morning briefing meeting materials together, get through the meeting and then once I'm back in my office, if its a quiet day, I blink, hold my eyes shut, and add non-red removing eye* drops hourly with little relief of the burning Saharan messes that are my eyes. This continues all day until I go home and wash my face and run a humidifier or have pots of boiling water on the stove. The only time I got relief was if I was out on a call and had work to think about so that I could ignore the pain for a while. Weekends were a little easier, but again, a newer house and decent air filtration combined with a killer vacuum probably made quite a difference. 

The past few weeks my allergies have had me feeling really low energy and down. Bike rides to work resulted in mild flu-like symptoms with fatigue and serious aches and pains. I stopped riding because it was making me feel so badly. I have never had that happen before. I wondered if the loss of Sadie and her previous decline were wearing on on me emotionally. I really felt bogged down, super low energy and began to wonder if I had some serious underlying medical problem ( I can't help that with my profession).

Then today, I stopped at the local Fred Meyer and checked out the allergy aisle since my Dr. recommended me continuing with Allegra in the morning and then adding Zyrtec at night. I was dreading adding another pill I'd have to take daily, but I figured trying wouldn't hurt. Then I saw this stuff:

I thought what the hell and I bought probably the 10th different eye drop in the past few years. I got back to the office and put one drop in each eye. I've done this hundreds of times and the best I got was a wetter eye that felt vaguely better for a few minutes before returning to that dry burning awfulness. These eye drops stung a little, but that subsided quickly. Then my eyes, felt simply O.K. That has never happened with any drops I'd gotten prescriptions for. Then amazingly about a half hour later I realized that my sinuses weren't stuffed up and my post nasal drip was gone. I was pretty sceptical until I found this article. Several hours later I'm still doing great and my energy had returned a bit. 

I feel like a whole new world has opened up for me. I spent the evening in the yard with Lucy the dog and can't wait to open the windows again on our next warm spring night. 

* the "get the red out" type eyedrops will actually make your eye problems worse. Only use these if you are a regular Jane like me who might be on TV one time for your 15 minutes of fame. Here is a link.