Fish Oil -- Specific Recs? (Brand / Product)

I'll write more about my "journey" below for more context and hopefully more targeted recommendations, but tl;dr: If you have a fish oil product that you feel confident caused a significant improvement in your dry eye symptoms, please let me know! (Brand, dosage, etc.) I'm especially interested in trying to hone in on an effective solution that is less expensive and makes my skin less oily than Nordic Naturals Ultimate Omega.

Me:

• Dry eyes since receiving PRK in 2019. More specifically, since around 6 months after the PRK: recovery months 1-3 were generally rough, 4-6 were totally fine, then things took a turn for the worse.
• Particular problem with dry eyes at night. This began with waking up in the morning with my eyelids literally stuck to my corneas, causing micro-abrasions to the epithelium of the cornea when opening my eyes. These would generally take the better part of the day to stop feeling painful / like sand in the eye. My body/brain seemed to adjust to this and after a while I started waking up several times during the night instead, with my eyes uncomfortably dry and needing drops but not to the point of being "stuck" -- so, less damaging to my eyes, but very damaging to my ability to achieve deep sleep and wake up feeling rested.
• Recording my sleep revealed that my eyes have a tendency to drift open for periods of time throughout the night. This has probably always been the case, but when my eyes were producing a normal amount & quality of tears, I just didn't notice it. Now, when combined with the generally increased dryness after the PRK (probably some amount of MBD involved), it makes for really rough nights/mornings.
• Other things I tried:
  • Restasis/cyclosporine: initially very mild but slowly building allergic reaction of full body itching + no apparent results had me quit after a few weeks
  • Artificial tears: temporary relief & lubrication (Systane Ultra PF vials are my go-to, though I haven't tried enough of their more recent formulation -- the milky-white one, can't recall the name -- to be able to compare)
  • Autologous tears: did a full course, no apparent improvement over artificial tears
  • Xiidra: no apparent improvement over artificial tears
  • Punctal plugs: no improvement, actually quite irritating
  • Every single nighttime ointment/gel: they would all just dry up and turn into irritants. Systane nighttime ointment was maybe a slight exception to this, in that I feel like it reduced my average wakings by a little, but mostly I felt like it was only effective on nights that I just didn't happen to open my eyes as much (so it didn't dry out)
  • Goggles: no improvement, maybe even weirdly worse somehow? Also, when tight enough to actually seal, they're just a hell of a thing to try to sleep with when you're already a light sleeper to begin with.
  • Eye taping: this took some experimenting but this became my secret weapon before I discovered fish oil, and reduced my nightly wakings from 4-5 to 1-3. I used a small amount of silicone tape on the outer corners of my eyes.
  • Honestly probably some other stuff I'm not thinking of right now. It's been a while and I was really utilizing the shotgun approach.
• Fish oil:

  • Don't repeat my mistakes: I have real regrets about how I approached this initially. My doctor told me something like "you probably won't see the full effects for at least a few months" but I went ahead and tried it for a few weeks / until the sample ran out, decided it didn't work, and gave up on it. If I had really listened to my doctor and given it a full trial, I could have saved myself 3 years of varying levels of unhappiness and many wasted hours/$ trying other things.

  • Second attempt, with NN Ultimate Omega: Still unhappy with my dry eyes at night, and increasingly scraping the bottom of the barrel, I went back to try fish oil again in 2023 with a double dose (2 servings/day, 4 pills total) of Nordic Naturals Ultimate Omega. And it worked! After 2 or 3 months, I was down to an average of 1 waking per night, meaning there were nights when I actually slept all the way through -- and there were periods of 1-3 days at a time when I didn't need to use drops at all. (Before, even with the eye tape, I would always need drops in the morning, and if I started the day very dry or had a lot of screen time then I might need them at some points throughout the day as well.)

  • Fake or improperly stored: Getting a little desperate to bring down the cost of the Ultimate Omega (which ran me around $500/year in the US at that point), last year I shopped around more and bought my usual Ultimate Omega on eBay instead of on the Nordic Naturals store on Amazon. Within a week or two of using the new pills, I started waking up more often and feeling like my eyes were just generally dryer. I don't think this was a placebo situation: the seller had excellent reviews, the packaging looked genuine & was non expired, and I was actually convinced that it was legit. When I started having doubts, I cut a pill open and it smelled and tasted exactly like the old ones. I couldn't deny the change, though -- and having read a little more about it since, my guess is simply that they were poorly stored. (Maybe fake too, though? I'm not a huge supplement nerd so I'm not up on the state of high quality fakes on eBay these days.) I ended up throwing the eBay-purchased bottle away, and within 2-4 weeks of getting back to my usual supply, I had gone back to my (relatively) happy place of 1 waking per night.

  • Cost/availability: This is an issue for me. $500/year is not cheap. Also, I recently moved abroad, and it now costs me about +50% to import these products -- so around $750/year.

  • Oily side effects: Something that's always bothered me about Ultimate Omega (at the dosage that's therapeutic for me) is that my skin is noticeably more oily while I'm taking it. It manifests most annoyingly in a lot of small pimples along my hairline, and a tendency to develop more pimples generally.

  • Tried ProEPA: While I was trying to find a NN source locally where I'm living now, I came across a video from a dry eye doctor who talked about how a high (3:1 or better) EPA:DHA ratio is supposedly ideal for Omega-3 supplements. Ultimate Omega is more like 3:2, so when I went to place my order I decided I would buy NN's ProEPA instead. I started with 4 pills/day (same amount of Omega-3s as my previous Ultimate Omega dosage) but with the hope that maybe I could go down to 3 a day and get the same benefits that I was getting with Ultimate Omega without the oily skin. (You may be seeing a trend here... in spite of everything, I am a very optimistic guy!)

  • ProEPA failed me: Turns out that even with 4 pills a day, I'm not getting oily skin... but I'm also not getting any of the eye benefits that I was getting with Ultimate Omega. Maybe it's once again a storage issue, or maybe the supposed superiority of a 3:1 ratio just isn't true or isn't correct in my case and what I really need is more DHA... I don't know. Anyway, less than a month in, I'm back to waking up 4-5 times a night, and I'm forced to admit that I should probably just trash the $200 worth of ProEPA that I ordered and place an order for Ultimate Omega again instead.

So that's my stirring tale of woe. If anyone has had similar experiences and found a substitute for Ultimate Omega that's less expensive or has fewer side effects: please do tell!

TIA!