Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Assache my eye

First time in a long damn time, I ended up with something in my eye today, a speck of rust I couldn't see or get out, stuck to my upper eyelid somewhere.

      You know how it is, you get something in your eye maybe 0.2mm in diameter, it feels like an elephant.

             You might think that this is a common occurence, working on the deck of a metal boat with rust, dust, rope yarns, etc here and there, but safety glasses are a thing, and safety sunglasses are an even better thing. I'm more likely to use my hard hat for an emergency toilet than put it on my head, (now there's a visual!) but I'm damn careful with my eyes.
     I once spent a week's pay to have a surgeon pulla piece of barnacle out of my eye when I was fishing for  a living. On several occasions I anesthetized my own eye and had to fish bits of stuff out that just didn't want to come out.
      But that was a long time ago, and since I just work coastwise now, I don't have a full ship's medicine chest to hand, either. No medications for home surgery.

 Instead I dumped a liter bottle of eyewash in my eye (fun!) and manged to free up the little fucker enough that it started to migrate and I could fish it out with a twist of paper towel.

     You know how it is when you get something out of your eye. It feels good. After fighting with this stupid thing for 45 minutes, never mind good, I almost came. Like hitting yourself with a hammer. It just feels so nice to stop.


8 comments:

Anonymous said...

You don't carry an eye loop? You can buy them for like $2...


Exile1981

Borepatch said...

Oof. Interesting idea of foreplay there, Captain. ;-)

Paul D said...

Lacerated a cornea once, while wearing safety glasses. Went ashore in Panama and waited 3 hours for the Dr. to show up. He was in surgery with a gun shot victim.

Anonymous said...

Happened to me one fine time. Felt like I had a toothpick in there when I blinked. Pulled it out with a tweezers from a Swiss Army Knife.
About three years later had to have an MRI. Made me get an orbital x-ray to prove there was no metal left in. Apparently, the MRI radiation hitting metal splinters damages the surrounding tissue. Very bad in the case of an eye.
V/R J West

Anonymous said...

I dig the Cheech and Chong reference. I love that song.

I consider myself to be a pretty tough guy, but it anything happens to my eyes I'm a complete baby. My worst moment was over in Bahrain working on painting a Patrol Boat. It was about 115 degrees out and I grabbed what I thought was a clean rag to get the sweat off my brow/eyelids. Well, the rag wasn't clean, it was soaked in denatured alcohol and I was too dumb to notice the cool feeling in my fingertips soon enough.

My buddies told me later that it looked pretty funny. I was stumbling around, grabbing at my face and screaming for a bottle of water.

Thankfully I didn't pay any long term consequences, other than the ridicule of the guys that saw it happen.

Ebb Tide said...

True Dat

East Of The Pecos said...

Had a steel splinter get past my safety glasses and embed itself in the eyeball. After the ER visit I had to go to a specialist and have the rust ring drilled out.
I NEVER want that kind of pain again. It was OK on the cornea, but when he hit the white, it felt like a hot needle. I taught the nurse a few new words that afternoon.

Anonymous said...

My friend took eye drops from the cabinet, put generous drops into both eyes. It was the wrong bottle: grapefruit seed extract. Very painful.
Cornea will take about 4-6 months to heal.
Doctor said he has seen worse: one fellow accidentally put in crazy glue.