Doctors recently reported the bizarre case of a 25-year-old woman suffering from an incredibly rare medical condition that caused her to bleed from her eyes during her monthly period.

Haemolacria, the condition that causes people to cry blood, is extremely rare, but Indian doctors documented the case of a woman with a similar, but even rarer condition called “ocular vicarious menstruation”. As the name suggests, it causes female sufferers to bleed from their eyes, but only during their monthly period. The 25-year-old woman, whose name was not revealed for privacy reasons, visited the emergency room at a hospital in Chandigarh, complaining about crying blood. All her tests came back normal, and it was only after the woman revealed that the same thing had occurred around the same time the month before that doctors made the connection to menstruation.

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19-year-old Delfina Cedeno has been suffering from a rare disorder for the past four years – she has been crying and sweating blood. Occasionally, blood also seeps out of her fingernails, belly button and nostrils.

Doctors at Delfina’s home town of Vernon, in the Dominican Republic, were baffled for a long time. Even after hundreds of tests, they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. In fact, no one believed Delfina until they actually saw her bleeding.

“At first, no one could help me and they looked at me like a crazy person when I told them what was going on,” the teenager said. “It was only when I started bleeding in front of a doctor one day that they began to take me seriously.” Things got totally out of hand when she bled for up to 15 days and was in such a critical condition that she needed a blood transfusion.

Delfina herself was scared to death and extremely stressed out with her horrifying condition. “When this started happening, I didn’t know what to think. I was terrified and in complete shock.” She also felt ashamed to leave home. Read More »

20-year-old Yaritza Oliva is living a nightmare. For the last couple of weeks the girl from Purranque, Chile, has been crying tears of blood and so far no one has been able to explain her mysterious condition.

Yaritza first noticed blood tears coming out of her eyes about two weeks ago, but due to her family’s poor financial situation, she couldn’t seek any professional help. The only ophthalmologist who attends at the local hospital in Purranque a few days a week has so many scheduled patients that he wouldn’t see her without an appointment. One of the few times she was consulted by a professional physician was when she was transferred at the hospital of Puerto Montt, where doctors were baffled by her condition, but could only give her some eye drops for the burning sensation she feels when the blood pours from her eyes. At first, Yaritza believed she suffered some kind of extreme conjunctivitis or infection, but after seeing photos and video footage of the girl crying blood, Dr.Alexander Lutz, an ophthalmologist at Las Condes Clinic, excluded those possibilities saying they have very different symptoms. He argued the mysterious condition could be caused by blood clotting problems, alterations in platelets or by the use of certain medications. An expert would have to check if there is bleeding in any other areas of Yaritza’s body, but she didn’t reveal anything of the sorts in the video interview with Chilean website 24 Horas. Read More »

Haemolacria is a real physical condition that causes people to actually cry tears of blood. The tears of people suffering from this condition may range from being just tinged red, to entirely made of blood. While the exact cause or cure for this condition is not clear, it is known to be a symptom of several blood-related diseases or tumors. Let’s take a look at the three most talked-about cases of haemolacria in recent years: Read More »