Separate from POIS, I have other health issues that I've been tending to for my entire life. One of these issues is chronic dry eyes, and my condition worsens during periods when my allergies get really bad (depending on the season/pollen distribution in the air where I live). POIS also severely irritates my eyes, and while experiencing a POIS episode I tend to get random tear-ups in my eyes throughout the day, sometimes at inconvenient moments including while conversing with someone or working at my computer.
I also have a condition known as 'reoccurring corneal erosion'. This means that my eyes will become so dry while asleep that on occasion my eyelids stick to the cornea of one eye (sometimes even both at the same time), and when I open my eyes upon waking up a piece of my cornea is torn off. This is excruciatingly painful, and most people who experience this only have it happen to them a handful of times throughout their life. I've had hundreds of corneal abrasions over the course of my life, and I'm only now in my early twenties. I have a theory that at some point when I was very young, I injured both of my eyes and my cornea never properly healed, resulting in uneven lower layers of both corneas which lead to my susceptibility to these abrasions. However, I've recently begun to consider surgery and alternative procedures that work to properly-regrow or heal the cornea in both of my eyes.
This past year my eye doctor proposed that I try something called 'Prokera' for my cornea issues. Prokera is a thin piece of amniotic membrane (derived from placenta) that is placed underneath a contact lens and absorbed over time by the patient's eye. Several months ago, I went in to have the device placed over one of my eyes and traveled back home with minimal discomfort. Within a couple hours, my eye was in so much pain that it felt more painful than a typical corneal abrasion. I almost didn't believe it at first, but after confirming that the situation required medical attention I arrived back at my eye doctor's office to be reexamined. My doctor noted that at first-glance my eye appeared normal, but upon removing the device it seemed as though the amniotic membrane was being attacked by my eye (as though I was experiencing some allergic reaction). The immune response from my eye so-aggressively targeted the membrane that the device was cutting off oxygen-circulation to my cornea. The pain I felt was essentially the result of my eye being suffocated (it was the most painful thing I have ever experienced, and nothing comes close). Even after removing the contact lens, emergency surgery was performed on my eye to ensure that any remaining pieces of the membrane were removed.
Long-story short my eye is better now, and I have fully recovered from everything that happened. A week after my emergency surgery took place, I visited my eye doctor to talk about everything relating to these complications. Apparently, my reaction to the Prokera device wasn't normal. In fact, the company manufacturing the treatment hadn't received a single report, from any patient over the course of multiple decades, in which any sort of allergic reaction occurred during treatment.
I haven't been able to stop wondering whether or not my experience with the amniotic membrane is related to the autoimmune dysfunction I experience with POIS. If POIS is truly an allergy to sperm or ejaculate, are there any chemical similarities between male sexual fluids and placenta? Or, is the mechanism that causes my immune system to react to sexual activity in any way paralleled with the response in my eye as it came in contact with an amniotic membrane? I don't think it's likely that the Prokera device is underreported or that it poses a threat to a minority of patients. Every doctor I've spoken to says they've never heard of an amniotic membrane procedure producing such a reaction, and that what happened to me was a medical anomaly.
TLDR: I experienced an unprecedented allergic reaction during an eye procedure that involved the absorption of an amniotic membrane (derived from placenta fluid). I'm curious if this is in any way related to POIS, as it is most unlikely that I'd suffer from two astronomically rare autoimmune mishaps that both involve reproductive fluids of some kind and have them be completely unrelated.
According to an article published in 2021, "there are no known reports of allergic reactions or rejection of Prokera."
https://osgeye.com/blog/279684-what-is-prokera#:~:text=Over%20the%20last%20three%20decades,Prokera%20is%20very%20safe.
