A very rare case of hemolacria was recently described in The New England Journal of Medicine.
This is the name of an unusual condition when blood comes out of the tear streams with or without tears. Sometimes there is not much of it, but sometimes it pours so hard that the patient's entire face becomes covered with blood.
This happens for various reasons, including maybe due to tumors or inflammation.
This was the case in Italy. An unnamed 52-year-old man came to the emergency room with thick streams of blood from his eyes.
The man looked as if he had become a victim of an attack by a maniac, and at first the doctors decided that. But then the patient began to tell that about two hours ago, blood spontaneously began to flow from his eyes.
The man was frightened, but calmed down when the blood stopped flowing. He attributed this to a one-time malaise. However, the blood soon began to flow again and then the man ran to the hospital.
At first, the doctors did not know what to do. They had not previously encountered such a situation, because hemolacria is extremely rare and each such case gets into the media as an abnormal phenomenon.
It is curious that apart from the obvious inconveniences, his condition did not cause any particular problems to the man, since he did not experience pain or discomfort.
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The doctors decided to examine the patient's eyes for injury and, finding nothing, then examined the nose at the same time. Everything turned out to be normal, vision was not damaged and no foreign bodies got into the eyes or nose.
However, a more thorough examination later revealed mild inflammation in the membrane covering the eyeball. And under both eyelids, several small benign tumors were found - hemangiomas. It was after this that the doctors diagnosed the patient with hemolacria.
For treatment, doctors prescribed Timolol eye drops to the man, which are mainly prescribed for the treatment of ocular hypertension. The drops helped the man and the blood no longer flowed from his eyes.
And in 2016, hemolacria was found in a British girl. She was bleeding 5 times a day, including from her ears.