Oh my god...I shot my eye out

The Sunday before last I was cutting a bolt with a dremel tool. I had my safely glasses on, but at one point I felt a puff of dust in my left eye. Shit. It didn't hurt, so I hoped I'd gotten lucky and went about my day. That evening it was still irritiated, so I had Angie help me flush my eye with saline solution (yes...I know I should have done that in the first place. *sigh*). I figured I was likely fine and the irritation had come from poking at it through the afternoon trying to see if anything was in it. Monday I went to work and it didn't get any better. So I scheduled a doctor's appointment for the next morning. Looking at my eye that night, I saw a black dot on the edge of the iris...but I wasn't sure if it was part of my eye or not.

The doctor put some drops in my eye and looked at it under a blacklight to check for corneal abrasions. Everything looked normal. No big surprise, because if I did have one, I should have been in a lot of pain. Whew! It was even kind of cool because he brought me to the mirror so I could see my eye fluoresce under the light. Then he pulled out the Ophthalmoscope and checked for debris...and found that my black dot was indeed a piece of metal. He tried swabbing it out with a q-tip, but found that it must be below the surface. So the doctor was really nice and called up a buddy who's an opthamologist to get me squeezed into their schedule. Here's where things get really fun.

After a bit of a wait, the doctor checked out the dot and away we went. They gave me a numbing drop, let that sit for 10-15 minutes and gave me a second. From there, he removed the dot with a needle, swabbed the piece off with a q-tip, and used a drill to smooth out the disturbed surface. A needle. In my eye. Take a moment to squirm on that one. Actually it wasn't that bad and didn't hurt at all. It was like someone just touching my eye. But I didn't get off that easy. I told the doctor that my eye was also irritated all the way out on the side. So he swabbed it to make sure we got everything. Swabbing here was not a light dabbing. It was pulling back the eyelid, jamming in the q-tip, and running across the eye. I yelped...and spent the next couple days feeling like someone punched me in the eye from the inside.

Everything has been fine for a few days now. And dear readers, the important lesson is:
"Safety GOGGLES, not safety glasses"

Oh, and if you're squeamish...you probably shouldn't have read this. ;)