Crying Crystals: White Discs Rise From Nursery Worker's Eyes

A NURSERY school teacher with a rare condition cries CRYSTAL tears

Laura Ponce baffled doctors when she revealed that strange white plaques rise up in her eyes for weeks at a time.

The 35-year-old from Lins, Brazil, first experienced crystal tears when she was just 15 and discovered her eye was filling with an unknown white substance. 

As Laura blinks to expel the white clots another one starts to form - the plaque is initially soft but as it reaches the air the texture changes to create a solid crystal.

Laura said: “It starts to swell then I have to open my eye to take out the membrane.

“When it dries it hardens, it gets really hard, it hurts a lot.”

The teenager and her mother, Marissa, were horrified when they were forced to continually remove hard white discs from Laura’s swollen eye socket.

Laura said: “My eye started to hurt and was reddening so I called my mother.

“We checked inside and there was a thick membrane. We took it out and I was scared,” Marisa added.

“We ran to the ER and the doctor on duty also got scared.

"The doctor was mystified."

For the next 20-years Laura experienced an episode every few months and the family searched to find someone who could explain her mysterious condition.

Marissa said: “The whole family was shaken – we went chasing doctor after doctor.”

Laura was often trapped at home because of the rare and shocking infection which can see her removing white membranes from her eye 30-times a day.

“I’m a nursery school teacher, I get angry not being able to work,” she said.

"Two years ago it was infected for six-months and I was taking 30-membranes out of my eye each day.

But after two decades of suffering a doctor might have discovered the cause of Laura’s mysterious condition.

Dr Raul Goncalves an ophthalmologist at Hospital de Olhos de Bauru said they are yet to find a case such as Laura’s in medical literature.

After running a series of tests on a jar of her crystallised tears, he now believes Laura’s white crystals are due to her eyes producing excessive amounts of keratin.

Dr Goncalves said: “I have been an ophthalmologist for 25-years and I have never seen anything like it.

“For these plaques to form so fast there could only be one explanation, it must be chemical.

“Every time we blink you’re lubricating your eye, and tears are made of three layers - a water layer a mucin layer and a fat layer.

“Each cell separately creates a product and when you blink you mix all this like a dough.”

When bacteria attack the eye the protein contents of the tear should defend it - but in Laura this first form of defence is failing.

“Her eyes are forced to produce the second line of defence," the doctor said.

“The cornea jumps into action, and in Laura’s case the cornea’s surface can secrete keratin.

“This keratin together with other components causes the tears crystallisation.”

Dr Goncalves has prescribed silver nitrate eye drops to manage Laura’s condition.

Now the nursery teacher has much fewer eye infections and can go back to work.

Laura said: “My expectations are for my eyes to be cured and for everything to be fine.”

* Laura's story appears in a new series of Body Bizarre, which starts on Thursday August 6, 9pm, on TLC