Michael Spann from Antioch, Tennessee has a very rare condition known in the medical world as haemolacria, an ailment that causes a person to shed tears tinged with or made entirely of blood. Spann's condition has left medical experts in the United States baffled. If this is any consolation, the very few affected with the confounding condition are also residents of Tennesse.
Medical experts say that haemolacria is an idiopathic condition or of an unknown cause. Some hypothesize that it can be due to tumors of the lacrimal glands. Incidents such as head injury and trauma may also cause similar bleeding occurrences.
Spann's condition started seven years ago when blood would stream down from his eyes, mouth, and nose almost on a daily basis. He experiences severe headaches but reported that the bleeding is now less frequent, just twice a week at most.
Spann explained hi condition to the media, saying that he was going down the stairs one day, when suddenly he felt intense pain and started to bleed.
"I felt like I got hit in the head with a sledgehammer. I never felt anything like it," Spann told the Tennessean.
"I have kids that ride by on bikes in this neighborhood who point and say, 'That's the guy who bleeds,'"I really don't want more than that," he said.
Because of his condition, the budding graphic artist decided not to got to college and shied away from society. He also cannot keep a job.
"He will start talking to someone, and his eyes will start filling up with blood. They haven't seen it before, and it will scare the living daylights out of them. It is very frustrating not to be able to treat or even get some kind of remission for it," shared Peggy Spann, Michael's mother.
Back in 2009, Calvino Inman also made the news for the same condition as Spann. Inman went to the bathroom and saw blood flowing down from his eyes. After he consulted doctors, diagnostic tests were conducted but they did not help. Inman is from Rockwood, Tennessee.
"Most of these were relatively young patients. As they matured, the bleeding decreased, subsided and then stopped," Dr. James Fleming of the Hamilton Eye Institute in Memphis and co-author of a review that looked into haemolacria cases in 2004, told the Tennessean.
"There probably is a cause, but it is a small tear duct that is only a millimeter or two or three in diameter. It's a tube. To get into that tube and examine that tube from one end to the other would cause scarring, and you could lose part of the tear duct. That's the dilemma that can cause problems, that we will leave someone with a permanent disability," Fleming added.
