Question: For the past three months I have had pain in both of my eye sockets. It's mostly the lower part of my eye sockets, and sometimes I can feel sharp pains shoot down behind my cheek bones. Rest doesn't make it go away, since it's usually still there when I wake up every morning. The pain varies throughout the day, and I sometimes go several days where it's a 2/10 and seems like it could be going away, but it never goes away completely and always ends up relapsing to a more severe level again. For the most part it's pretty random, but the thing that seems to make it consistently relapse is physical exertion of my arms, back, and neck, like carrying heavy boxes or shoveling heavy snow. Every time I do something like that, the next day the pain in my eye sockets rises to an 8/10 or 9/10. I also have pains in my neck, on both sides, that feel like nerve or artery pain and seems to reach down to my shoulders. And the skin around my neck and jaw feels strange sometimes, like sandpaper was slipped underneath the skin. I wouldn't really call it tingling, but a weird electricity kind of feel -- not painful, but definitely not normal -- like underneath the skin is continually trying to heal. And it seems to flare up mostly at the same time my eye socket pain is flaring up.

I went to an ophthalmologist a month and a half ago. He gave me a dilated eye exam and he saw nothing wrong with my eyes. This all seemed to start a day after I ate a large amount of ice cream. After I had eaten all the ice cream, my fingers were tingling and numb. The next day my right foot felt numb, cold and tingling. At the same time my foot symptoms started, I began to get a very intense heat sensation behind my eyes, but not in the eyes themselves. The heat sensation went away with sleep, but the next day is when the sharp eye socket pains started, and it hasn't gone away since then. My foot returned to normal after a week, though.

One thing I should probably stress is the fact that my fingers were numb and tingling after I ate all the ice cream (which was a lot of ice cream -- way more than I would usually ever eat), and then the next day my foot was numb and very cold, while the other foot was warm and normal, and that problem lasted for about a week before it returned to normal. At the exact same time the foot problem started, my eye socket symptoms became noticeable. I figured I might have had diabetes, so I went to the doctor and got a blood test and they said my blood glucose was very high, but not high enough to be considered diabetic. Do you think possibly high blood glucose and a huge spike in my sugar intake from all that ice cream could have caused some sort of nerve or blood vessel problem that lead to my chronic eye socket pain?

One more thing worth mentioning is that if I press really hard on the back of my head (near the base of the skull) it seems to effect the eye socket pain. Depending on how forcefully I do it, the eye socket pain could somewhat go away for a few seconds to even a minute or two, but it always comes back, sometimes a little worse.