Snowballs in April

What! Dr. T, what are you talking about now? I know you must think I’m crazy (or maybe that I’ve just move back to Syracuse), but today I’d like to talk about snowballs. I’m not speaking of the fluffy white snow packed into a perfect round ball kind of snowballed though. I’m talking about small events that happened one after another that add up to something bigger. 

Several years ago, my husband learned about Dave Ramsey. Dave Ramsey teaches financial peace. He has a radio show, books and courses all about getting people out of debt and achieving financial peace.  One of his methods is something he calls the debt snowball. 

Debt snowball in a nut shell: 

1) Line up all of your debts from smallest amount to largest amount 

2) Pay the minimum payment to each item, except for the smallest item 

3) Whatever extra money you have to spare, throw it at the smallest bill.  Pay this off first, and as quickly as you can. 

4) Once you have tackled the smallest bill, put the money that you were putting towards that bill on the next larger one.  

5) As you continue to pay off the debt you have more and more money you to use. 

6) Each month, the money SNOWBALLS. 

In my practice, her patients often ask me why their eyes are dry. They feel like it’s happened just all of a sudden. When in fact, it was .a series of small things going on for years and years.  Then, one day the last thing has happened, and now their eyes are just unbearably dry. 

So often, dry eye is caused by a multitude of factors.  

Let’s follow this example:  

1) You are female.  Eight out of ten dry eye sufferers are women. 

2) You start wearing contact lenses in your teenage years.  

3) You start sleeping in your contact lenses.  They never bother you, so you don’t take them out as often as you know you should.  Or, you don’t throw them away as often as the doctor told you to. 

4) You wear makeup, and you’re just too tired at the end of the day to remember to remove it, along with your contact lenses.  

5) This may go on for years and years without problem.  

6) Then one day, something changed.  Maybe the pollen count happens to be particularly high.  Or, you needed to take an oral allergy medication. You pop an over the counter antihistamine. 

7) Shazam your eyes are sooo dry you can’t hardly stand it. They feel dry and scratchy, like the Sahara Dessert. By the end of the day you’ve been on your computer for eight hours like any other work day and your eyes are aching and you could barely keep them open.  

The Snowball gained momentum and is quickly speeding down the hill.  Seemingly, you didn’t have any dry eye symptoms on Monday, but by Thursday your eyes feel dry as a bone. But the truth of the matter is that you had a ton of risk factors that were adding up year after year after year. So, for the next few weeks, we are going to spend some time talking about the various causes of dry eye disease. 

If you have read my book, Alleviate Dry Eye, then you know that Chapter 1 goes over the reasons for developing dry eye in detail.  You can pick up a copy of the book on Amazon.