India: Medical experts reported an extremely strange and rare case of a 25-year-old woman suffering from a condition that caused her to bleed from her eyes during menstruation.
The condition called Haemolacria causes people to cry blood, but Indian doctors documented the case of a woman with a similar but even rarer condition known as “ocular vicarious menstruation”. The bizarre condition causes women to bleed from their eyes, but only while they’re on their monthly period. The woman in this story, whose identity has not been revealed, went to the ER at a Chandigarh hospital to seek urgent help. Surprisingly, the tests came back normal, but after she told doctors that it had been happening in the same period of time the month before, they immediately made the connection to menstruation.
The frightened woman said her bleeding eyes were not causing her any pain or irritation, and the tests showed nothing unusual.
She did not have a history of ocular bleeding or any sort of ophthalmological issues, and she was not bleeding from other places.
After learning more about the woman’s symptoms, the doctors came to the conclusion that she had ocular vicarious menstruation.
This actually happened in rarest of rare caseshttps://t.co/4NR7gUcfll
— Víkrám💎 (@gvicks) April 18, 2021
The extremely rare condition causes females to bleed from extragenital organs, with the most common one being the nose.
In other cases, women also experienced bleeding from the lips, eyes, and even their lungs or stomachs.
“Oestrogen and progesterone can increase permeability of capillaries resulting in hyperaemia, congestion and secondary bleeding from extrauterine tissue,” the authors of a study documenting the woman’s case, clarified.
After she was diagnosed, the woman was given oral contraceptives which contain a combination of estrogen and progesterone, and three months later she reported that the eye bleeding had stopped.
An abstract from the study read:
“Bloody tears or haemolacria is a rare clinical entity. It is caused by various ocular and systemic conditions. Haemolacria due to vicarious menstruation is even rarer. In this article, we presented a case of cyclical episodes of bloody tears coinciding with menstrual cycle in a 25-year-old married female patient. Extensive physical, ophthalmological and radiological evaluation failed to reveal other potential causes of her complaint. A diagnosis of ocular vicarious menstruation was made and she was treated with oral contraceptive pills. No such episode recurred during 3 months follow-up period.”
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