Eyes do get 'cold' but it feels like pain instead

Michelle Weber, 6, a first-grader at Greenbrier Elementary School in Arlington Heights asked, "When you are out in the very cold weather, why don't your eyes get cold?"

Yeoowch! That's what happens when a grain of sand flies into your eye, or an eyelash gets stuck inside an eyelid. The pain is astounding. But if that grain of sand got stuck between your toes, or the eyelash fell onto your cheek, most likely you wouldn't feel any pain at all.

Your eye is a complex organ. The clear cornea covers the pupil (that black dot in the center of your eye) and the iris (the colored part surrounding the pupil). The cornea is responsible for much of the eye's focusing process.

Woven in the cornea membrane are many pain and touch receptors. Its surface has the most nerves of any organ in the body. In the cornea, severe cold temperatures can give the feeling of pain rather than the sensation of cold.

"We do feel cold with our cornea," said Dr. Bahram Rahmani, an ophthalmologist at Chicago's Children's Memorial Hospital. "The cornea is a tissue which is rich with pain receptors; the most sensitive part of the body surface." Rahmani said even a tiny speck of dust or dirt can cause pain. "That's why eye drops sting. We tend to partially close our eyes to protect them from wind and cold," he said.

The eyelid and the skin around the eyelid are also sensitive to cold, Dr. Rahmani said, and that sensitivity could cause pain. Even so, eye pain might not always signal a pain in your eye, but it could mean there's something's causing pain somewhere else, like in the skin around your eye, in your sinuses, or it could be associated with headache pain.