We’re all probably guilty of using the statement “my eyes are bleeding”, slang for when you happen to come across something you want to unsee but obviously can’t. For one woman though, this phrase got too real.
A 25-year-old woman from the northern Indian city of Chandigarh baffled doctors when she turned up at a hospital with bloody tears falling from her eyes. She said that while she wasn’t experiencing any pain or discomfort, the exact phenomenon had occurred just a month before. What was even more confusing for doctors was that she’d undergone various ophthalmological and radiological investigations, which had all came back normal. She did not have a family history of ocular bleeding, such as a haemorrhage that occurs when the blood vessels leak or break just below the eye tissue.
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It was only after digging deeper that doctors realised the bleeding eyes only occurred when the woman was on her period, thus concluding that she had a rare condition called ocular vicarious menstruation.
Medical journals refer to ocular vicarious menstruation as a rare condition of cyclical bleeding outside the uterine cavity during a woman’s menstrual cycle. Those diagnosed with this condition often experience bleeding in their lungs, kidney, lips, stomach, nose or eyes.
According to the British Medical Journal, which published the case study on the woman from Chandigarh on March 9, she was treated with a combination of oral contraceptives including estrogen and progesterone for three months. After this treatment, the bleeding tears seem to have ceased, making it a potential cure for those who suffer from this condition.
Though this condition is extremely rare, there have been a handful of cases since the twentieth century. In 1913, a doctor in Roswell, New Mexico, reported a case of a woman who had ulcers on both her legs that would bleed and become especially large during her period. According to the report, the peculiar condition disappeared after she gave birth, though she had to endure a difficult pregnancy.
In a study published in 2014, the journal of Ophthalmic Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery highlighted the case of a 31-year-old Black woman who wanted to get the condition surgically corrected. While the exact anatomical cause of this condition is yet to be determined, experts believe endometriosis—a condition where “tissue similar to the lining of the womb starts to grow in other places,” according to Britain’s National Health Service—is a key factor.
In 2016, a report found that a British teenager named Marnie Ray would bleed from her ears, nose, mouth, scalp, and fingernails due to an undiagnosed condition, which would get worse when she was menstruating.
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