Teen who almost lost her eyesight to acne medication opens up
She has now embraced her cystic acne
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Your support makes all the difference.A teenager has opened up about her cystic acne and the acne medication that left her fighting to keep her eyesight.
Emma O’Mahoney, from Indiana, struggled with acne for most of her life. But after nearly going completely blind, the teen has embraced her skin on social media, as she fights to regain her vision.
When O’Mahoney was 15, a doctor prescribed medications to clear up her skin, including doxycycline, a common drug used to treat acne.
According to the NHS, doxycycline is an antibiotic used to treat chest infections, skin infections, and sexually transmitted infections. The medication is also used to prevent malaria and treat acne.
Potential side effects include headaches, nausea or vomiting, and sensitivity to the sun.
However, after two years of taking the medication to control her acne, O’Mahoney noticed her back began to hurt.
She told Allure: “I had severe pain that prevented me from doing anything at dance lessons. I was seeing a chiropractor, but nothing seemed to be working.”
Shortly after, she noticed a ringing in her ears, which doctors wrote off as a lack of circulation.
But it wasn’t until O’Mahoney’s vision began to blur that she realised something was seriously wrong.
After multiple doctors visits and tests, she was eventually diagnosed with intracranial hypertension - a condition that occurs from “high pressure within the spaces that surround the brain and spinal cord,” according to the National Eye Institute (NEI).
According to O’Mahoney’s Instagram post explaining why you may see her “walking around town with a cane,” the medication caused spinal fluid to build up in her brain and swelled her optic nerve, causing her to lose a lot of her eyesight.
“When I was admitted to the hospital, they told me I was a day away from being completely blind,” she wrote.
Now, a year after the terrifying incident, multiple surgeries and “heavy medication,” O’Mahoney has “a lack of peripheral vision” and “lovely blind spots that like to dance around my eyes.”
The 19-year-old is also blind in the lower half of her left eye, according to her Instagram post, and has night blindness.
However, despite the horrific ordeal, O’Mahoney remains optimistic - and has learned to accept her skin, acne and all.
“My skin is doing the best it can at the moment, and for right now, that has to be good enough. So here I am, no makeup, acne, and happy,” she wrote on Instagram.
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