Eye injury can be a very scary thing to deal with whether you got scratched or poked in the eye may be a foreign body or chemical splash to the eye these sort of emergencies can cause severe pain redness and even lead to vision loss and even blindness for some people.
In this article, we are going to share some eye care emergency tips that’ll help you to be more prepared when an emergency strikes so that you can have better outcomes.
The most common thing that the eye care professionals deal in the eye clinic is probably people coming in with foreign bodies (some sort of an unwanted object that could have gotten into the eye) or some sort of chemical exposure to the eye.
Most commonly we’ll see people with chunks of metal from grinding out in the workshop or in a garage due to not wearing proper safety eye protection or maybe they were cutting wood or splitting wood or something like that.
1. Never try to rub your eyes
If a chemical or a foreign body ever gets into your eye the first thing that most people will do just out of instinct is they go up to rub their eye and this is going to either make things worse by digging the foreign body deeper into the eye or it’s just going to kind of expose that chemical again deeper into the tissue so it’s most important not to rub your eyes.
2. Rinse your eye
If you are the person who uses contact lenses then in the case of chemical splash or any such type of eye emergency be quick and wash your hands, remove those contacts immediately and then you need to flush your eyes.
There are several ways to flush the eyes:-
- If you are at work or a place of business that has an eyewash station that is perfect to use.
- If you don’t have an eyewash station available then use either the bathroom or kitchen sink and hold your face under the tap then turn on warm water doesn’t turn on hot water or freezing cold water just something kind of lukewarm it’s going to be more comforting.
Make sure you’re blinking frequently and that you’re able to kind of hold that eye open a bit so that the water flushes right in and then flushes out again you want to rinse whatever chemicals or foreign object might have gotten into the eye
3. Call your local eye care professional
After rinsing the eye whether you think you got everything out of there or not it is always best to call a local eye care professional in your area right away to see if they can get you to be seen in general for these sort of emergencies you have a foreign body or chemical exposure.
Eye care professional whether an ophthalmologist or optometrist they can usually address your needs a little bit better with more finesse to reduce your chances of having complications and from there if your eye doctor can’t address the issues are they something out of their hands then they will direct you over to the emergency.
4.Bring chemical sample- chemical exposure
In the case of a chemical exposure something splashes up into your eye try to take its sample and bring that with you to the eye care professional because they’ll want to see what exactly that the chemical is if it’s something that they need to neutralize further or this helps in a better understanding of how those chemicals react on the eye because by knowing chemical and its ph (whether it’s really acidic or basic) your eye care professional can take better decisions for you.
5. Always carry eyewash kit/solution
It’s handy to keep an eyewash solution with you for the time of an emergency you can keep it in your medicine cabinet. This is just an eye relief eyewash that you can buy generically over the pharmacy or online this one is from Bausch and Lomb works pretty simply it’s just an eyewash solution that you can use to clean out the eye in case again something gets in there or splashes in there.
Eyewash works pretty easily you can either tilt your head back and squirt it directly into the eye or it has a little eye cup that you can fill with water and then it’s just a matter of holding that to the eyelid and blinking multiple times as it rinses out the eye.
Also, most eyewashes do have a preservative in it called benzalkonium chloride or bak, and in the eye care community we know this as a very good preservative for eye drops however, bak can really hurt or irritate the eyes for a lot of people and so you never want to use this with contact lenses if you try to use it as a contact lens disinfecting solution or store your contacts in it do not do that it’s going to burn your eyes it’s only for the eye wash only.
