Thyroid Eye Disease Management Tips for Patients
Thyroid Eye Disease may bring new challenges, but these tips can help you continue to live your life
The true impact of Thyroid Eye Disease (TED) goes well beyond the eyes. It can also have a big impact on all aspects of life. While these changes may not always be visible, they shouldn’t be overlooked. Along with learning how to speak up for yourself with your doctor, there are small adjustments you can make—in and out of the house—that can help manage your condition and help you live the life you want.
Tips for managing vision changes
What you may experience:
Pain and changes to your vision or how easily you can move your eyes can limit how well you do certain tasks. This can include:
- Difficulty driving
- Depending on others for care
- Having to miss work because of symptoms
Ways to help:
- Place furniture where you can see it
- Put the TV and computer where there’s no glare
- Try to always wear non-slip footwear
- Use single-use products to avoid measuring
- Have a designated place where you put things
- If affordable, robot vacuum cleaners help reduce eye strain and tripping hazards while vacumming
- Tape down rugs to avoid slips and falls
- Tape or tuck away all cords to avoid tripping
- Stay away from heavy air flow areas (like vents and fans)
- Relieve swelling, redness, and irritation with a warm compress
- Avoid eucalyptus as it can make eyes burn
- Use saline solution or artificial tear drops as recommended by your doctor
Learn about a few apps that can help you manage living with vision changes
Tips for managing emotional changes
What you may experience:
Dealing with TED can be frustrating, and you may feel embarrassed about how it changes the way you look. It’s not uncommon to feel:
- Depressive feelings
- Anxious
- Self-conscious
- A loss of self-worth
- Like you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror
- Disconnected from friends, family, and hobbies
Ways to help:
- Meditation and breathing exercises are great ways to reduce stress and anxiety. Consider downloading a meditation app to your phone
- Be mindful. Acknowledge your feelings but don’t dwell on the negative. Instead, embrace the positives
- Listening to audio books can uplift and empower
- Professional counseling can help you cope with emotional challenges
Learn about some apps to help you with the emotional changes of TED
Tips for managing social changes
What you may experience:
How you live with Thyroid Eye Disease can change your social life and your relationships because you may feel self-conscious/embarrassed about the changes to your appearance. For example, you may:
- Avoid other people and social events
- Have a hard time making normal facial expressions
- Have problems holding face-to-face conversations
Ways to help:
- Shop at stores that you know
- Run errands at off-peak hours to avoid busy areas
- Know your limits. Be sure to take breaks in places without light glare, windows, or fans
- Always have sunglasses available. Keep extra pairs in convenient places such as your car, bag or purse, workplace and at home near your car keys
- When walking with others, sync your steps at a comfortable pace
- If traveling, avoid carry-on items—check your bags instead
- In hotels, put a towel over your pillow to avoid dust hurting your eyes
- Always remember to bring your eye drops
Connect with others who understand what you’re going through
What you may experience:
If you’re like most people, your smartphone or another electronic device is never out of arm’s reach. But TED can cause vision changes that:
- Make it harder to read on a small screen
- Cause the bright light of a screen to be painful
- Make it difficult to navigate a website or search for what you are looking for
- Make you feel like you can’t participate in text message conversations with your friends or family
Ways to help:
- Increase the font size on all of your devices. Most smartphones, tablets, and computers will let you do this from the Settings, Accessibility, or Display menu
- Activate the Read Aloud function for websites, text messages, and email
- Adjust the brightness on all of your screens so you can see with less pain
- Download one of the apps below for people living with changes to their vision
Be My Eyes
Be My Eyes is a free app that connects people who are blind or have low vision with sighted volunteers for visual assistance through a live video call. Every day, sighted volunteers lend their eyes to solve nonmedical tasks both big and small to help people lead more independent lives.
Evernote
Evernote is a free app for your smartphone, tablet, and computer. It allows you to voice record your notes, to-do list, and can even set reminders. The beauty of Evernote is that it syncs automatically across all of your devices, and across all operating systems.
Audible
Audible is the world’s largest producer and provider of spoken-word entertainment and audiobooks, enriching the lives of millions of listeners every day.
Snap&Read
The Snap&Read app reads aloud the text from websites, images, photographs, PDFs, and more. Snap&Read also adjusts complex text to be more readable and can translate text into over 100 languages. You can even take a picture and have the text within that picture read aloud.
NaturalReader
NaturalReader is text-to-speech app that reads webpages, documents, and e-books aloud with quality, natural-sounding voices.
Calm
Calm is an app that helps you sleep better, stress less and live better. Calm offers the life-changing skill of meditation, calming sessions to aid sleep, and exclusive music to help you focus, relax, and sleep.
Headspace
Through guided meditation, Headspace teaches the life-changing skills of meditation and mindfulness in just a few minutes a day. Helping people stress less, focus more, and sleep better.
