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First off- disclaimer - this is general advice, I am not giving you medical advice, I am not your doctor, I cannot diagnose or treat any conditions through the internet.

Chalazia once they become firm and not swollen or red are often resistant to treatment but they can be treated with hot compresses.

A hordeolum is a warm, swollen, tender meibomian gland and these respond better to treatment with compresses. They can sort of "burn out" and become a firm, nontender, chalazion.

> I'm almost always in public so it's kind of impossible to carry a facecloth around with me, soaking my eye all day.

It sounds like someone didn't explain how to do compresses to you. First off, if you're going to use a washcloth you need a FRESH, clean washcloth each time so hanging around to one washcloth all day is wrong right off the bat. Second, you don't need to soak your eye all day. You need about 10 minutes of continuous heat applied to your eyelids followed by massaging the oil glands and washing your eyelashes. This video explains the compresses and massage.. After you do this, take a clean washcloth with some baby shampoo and scrub your eyelashes clean then rinse well.

Blepharitis, hordeola, and chalazia are treated by doing that whole thing two or three times per day. Do it once when you wake up, once after work, once before bed. No need to carry anything around.

People think a washcloth is effective but really like the video shows this is most easily done by buying a hot compress eye mask like this thing from amazon. It's near impossible to keep a washcloth hot for 6 minutes. You end up having to rewarm it, your eyelids have cooled off by the time you rewarm it, and then you're back at square one and never get enough heat to the oil glands where it is needed.


These are caused by blocked meibomian oil glands. These glands sit right behind your eyelashes.


>I also am someone who wears makeup every. day. Do I REALLY have to give up wearing it?

If you are putting mascara and eyeliner on every day then yes, you should maybe give that up for a while. If you keep plugging up those glands every day while they're obviously inflamed you're going to get more of them.


> I can make a trip to my family doctor, optometrist or an ophthalmologist, but the healthcare where I live sucks and I probably wouldn't get in to see either for a month+.

I really hope you are seeing an Optometrist or Ophthalmologist at least yearly if you are wearing contacts!! Some of this post makes it seem like you've been wearing contacts this whole time but haven't had an eye doctor look at your eyes. That's worrisome and can be way, way more dangerous than a chalazion.

Here's a question: are you actually in the US?

I work for a surgeon in Zurich (currently redoing the English-language website) that was developing CXL back in the day (Farhad Hafezi), and continues to research what's going on at the molecular level in keratoconic corneas, and how to improve CXL (his research group showed the importance of oxygen availability in the reaction, and why that limits how fast CXL can be performed, for example) https://www.elza-institute.com/corneal-cross-linking-cxl/ - he also co-wrote the textbook! https://www.amazon.com/Corneal-Cross-Linking-Farhad-Hafezi-MD/dp/1630912107

I have thin corneas, so I'm absolutely delighted I work for the ELZA Institute and can have them monitored regularly and easily. :)

If you are in the US, on the West Coast, the other author of the textbook is J. Bradley Randleman (https://eye.keckmedicine.org/doctors/j-bradley-randleman/) and he's wonderful at it too.

Practically, though, there are many good cornea specialists out there (and everyone's right - you need a cornea specialist) whatever country you are in. What's most important is getting treated. IMHO, you need to have a surgeon that's offering epi-off CXL. Epi-on is getting better, but it's not there yet. You want CXL to stop your KC progressing; why risk it? And Epi-on risks that far more than epi-off.


One thing my boss can do that is above and beyond regular CXL in keratoconus is also perform a custom Trans-PRK laser ablation - you'd be very unlikely to be 20/20 afterwards like most laser refractive procedures, but you would have an easier time of it with sclerals etc. Hafezi did a lot of the development with one of the laser manufacturers, Schwind, to get their excimer algorithms right in post-CXL corneas, so if anyone knows how to do that best, it's him.

These are pretty cool.

If that's the only room you were tested in, it was probably an autorefractor. You can only test some things at optical infinity, and these instruments use lenses to imitate optical infinity like a viewmaster or stereopticon.

Autorefractors use invisible light to focus their own image on your retina, so while you're concentrating on the target, it's busy taking pictures of an invisible image at different focus settings, measuring what it takes to focus. Autorefractors are usually very consistent.. you can pull the trigger over and over and get the same result. But when you put that measurement in glasses, it may give poor acuity and it may be headachey.

For a hundred years we've used a simple instrument called a retinoscope to generate another repeatable-but-blurry estimate. Retinoscopy is very portable and it's still used for kids and others who can't answer questions or hold their head up to a box.

The most accurate measurement for glasses (best acuity) is you telling us which lenses are clearest in a guided sequence. That procedure (subjective refraction) requires a skilled examiner and a larger room, which might not be available. But for best acuity the gold standard is subjective refraction.

For a novelty type thing on the cheaper end of the scale, I suggest this. It was one of the few things that was fought over a bit at my work's (work for an ophthalmology practice) white elephant gift thing.

Yep. Gave me a bottle himself.

The eye is a globe. The fluid mechanics of it is not unlike a snow globe. Have you ever played this game Original Golf Globe Game - Water Globe Golf-Ball-on-the-Tee Challenge https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017AKK59S/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_2e7GAbD50BF3J? If you have, it makes a lot more sense. Basically, the floaters are not attached, so they don’t move with the eye, similar to the way that the crash test dummy doesn’t stop when the car stops.