Laura Ponce, a nursery school teacher in Lins, Brazil, suffers from a strange condition that causes her to cry ‘crystal’ tears. The white plaques start off as soft blobs inside her eyes, but they harden when she blinks in an attempt to expel them, finally emerging as solid white crystals. Oddity Central has more:
This happens to her for weeks at a time, with a new plaque forming as soon as she expels another. It gets so bad at times that she has to take time off work, to remove as many as 30 plaque membranes from her eye in a day. “A clot starts to swell then I have to open my eye to take out the membrane,” she explained. “When it dries it hardens, it gets really hard, it hurts a lot.”
Ponce is currently seeing Dr. Raul Goncalves, an ophthalmologist at Hospital de Olhos de Bauru, Brazil. “Every time you blink, you’re lubricating your eye, and tears are made of three layers – a water layer, a mucin layer, and a fat layer,” he explained. “Each cell separately creates a product and when you blink you mix all this like a dough.” Dr. Raul’s guess is that the protein content in Ponce’s tears aren’t protecting the eye from bacteria. So, her eyes are forced to produce a second line of defense.
