by: Dr. Liz
OK all of you who have done weekend projects without your safety glasses on..LISTEN UP!
This is a story of molten plastic glued to the cornea of an eyeball. If you are lucky this will never happen to you but always seems to when you least expect it.
True story:
A few weeks ago on a Sunday afternoon a neighbor of mine drove up to my house with his hand over his left eye, tears streaming out from underneath telling me that he needed help. It turns out he was working under his house with hot plastic and a torch without his safety glasses on (they were on his head) trying to get some plumbing completed. The hot plastic snapped and a piece flew up into his eye and now he couldn't see out of that eye and he was in a great deal of pain. He told me that he had his safety glasses off for just a second and that's when it happened.
I looked at his beet red eye and sure enough he had a large piece of plastic covering the center of his left pupil. I told Steve that we needed to go to my office immediately.
We jumped in my car and drove to Wink Optical so I could get a better look with my fancy microscope. He was very happy when I numbed up his eye because now it didn't hurt and he could open his eye wide enough for me to take a good look.
Sure enough the extremely hot plastic adhered to his cornea and I had to figure out how I was going to peel it off... Thankfully I had the tools to extract it off Steve's cornea and clean up the area so he did not have a secondary reaction where the plastic and the cornea met.
This story had a good ending with this patient having little to no permanent vision loss but I have to say he is one of the luckier cases I have seen.
Please wear your safety glasses even when you are doing simple projects. All it takes is one unlucky moment that can change your life forever.
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