My day began like most other days. I woke up and started my daily routine of brushing my teeth, showering and heading to the kitchen to take my daily vitamins and supplements. In the middle of preparing my morning cold brew, I heard my wife calling my name. But it wasn’t the normal way she speaks, there was something more urgent in her voice, almost painful.

Upon checking in on her, I found her with her hands covering her left eye telling me “I feel like something is stabbing me in my eye.” In that moment, I remembered an old friend and eye doctor once telling me “If you can feel your eyes, chances are there’s something wrong.”

Being fortunate enough to be able to see this friend right away, he discovered there was some mascara residue affixed to my wife’s eyeball, which was causing the pain. But why is this happening now? “Missy he said, you are now one of the 16 million people in the United States that has dry eye disease.”

That’s the day dry eye disease became a huge topic of conversation among our family and friends. Suddenly, everywhere we looked we began to notice the signs and symptoms of dry eye.

When discussing with our college age daughters and their friends, they too said they felt their eyes after long days using their laptops. Our friends were zooming from home and wearing masks all the time because of the pandemic, they also described some of the signs and symptoms of dry eye. Even our best friend’s son, who is a competitive gamer, told us he could feel his eyes after a grueling day behind his monitors. And our youngest daughter, who loves watching makeup tutorials on Instagram and YouTube, told us that she sometimes feels some of what we were describing.