Most of us have been to the ER for serious reasons (us or relatives), but how many of you have wrestled with your blankets at 4:30 am and as a result jammed your thumbnail into your eye?
(raises hand shamefully)
Around 6:30 or so I realized it was hurting more, not less - especially when I blinked - so I went to the ER (urgent care wasn’t open yet). Three hours later I had some eyeball antibiotics for my corneal abrasion, and home I came. It still hurts like the dickens if I blink, but it’ll heal. And I’ll always have the comically 3D-horror-movie image of the thumb plunging into my eye burned into my memory.
Presumably some of you have also landed in the ER for odd reasons…
My late wife once was wearing a Christmas sweater with a reindeer-shaped brooch pinned to it. While taking it off, she poked her eye with the brooch, which required a trip to the ER. When asked what happened, she said “I poked my eye with a reindeer”, which elicited a puzzled look until I clarified.
When I was dating my now-wife, she shared an apartment with her sister. One Christmas Eve, the two of them were getting the apartment ready for guests (including myself); her sister was fluffing the sofa cushions by holding them with one hand and slapping at them with the other hand.
At one point, she somehow missed the cushion, and slapped her own hand, fairly hard. Her index finger started to really hurt, and she wound up having my then-girlfriend take her to the ER. She had, in fact, broken her index finger, while fluffing a cushion.
This doesn’t quite fit the category, since I took him to the eye doctor, not the ER, but when my son was in middle school, he had to pull hard to get a sheet of paper out of his notebook and got a paper cut on his cornea. He got antibiotic drops. It took quite awhile to heal. He’d empathize with your pain.
I haven’t required an ED visit for an injury. However, I did smash my eye orbit against an airplane tray table that slipped down at the instant I was retrieving a dropped item from the floor, resulting in me arriving home from Antarctica with an enormous shiner. I said I’d gotten into an altercation with a gentoo penguin.
My lovely wife recently tripped over an unpainted parking block that extended into a walkway of the same greyish cement, breaking her nose in two places and occasioning an ED bill that included a $28 Tylenol.
My sister was rearranging her fridge and dropped one of the glass shelves on her bare foot. The corner of the shelf landed on her big toe and somehow split her toenail. Her toe was bleeding and wouldn’t stop so she had to go to the ER. They had to remove her toenail to stitch up the cut.
I haven’t had the misfortunes that some of you have had. My brother, however, was outside of the city of Juneau by himself, wearing a sidearm for bear protection. He left the road and laid down by a creek. For some reason he thought he’d practice his quick draw while lying down and shot himself through the knee. He managed to crawl back up to the road and someone finally came along and spotted him. This was in the 1950s, so the person had to run back to where there was a house with a telephone and get someone out there before he bled to death.
Ref the OP, I’ve landed in the urgent care for a corneal abrasion that somehow occurred overnight. No idea how, but it might have been an errant thumbnail.
My last genuine ER visit was for an umbilical hernia. Which was repaired on a non-emergent schedule the next day after spending the overnight admitted upstairs. The freakness was that earlier that day I’d gotten married. Made for a very low-key wedding night, but strangely memorable nonetheless.
In fact seeing “eye bruises” is pretty common in the ER. Though they tend to be from inquisitive toddlers, rather than self-inflicted. Good news is corneal cells heal quickly, usually in just a few days.
I once pooped so hard I ruptured a blood vessel somewhere inside my gooch and was heavily leaking blood from my junk. Rushed to the ER where they did an urgent insertion of a large-gauge catheter without anesthesia to compress the damaged vessel and stop the bleeding.
Send quick healing vibes to you @Maserschmidt !
Good that you got prompt treatment!
A few weeks ago a guy I know was playing with his young kid, who accidentally hit him in the eye. The next day his eye was red and sore, so he went to Urgent care where they diagnosed conjunctivitis and gave him eye drops.
His eye kept getting redder and sorer so days later he went to the ER where they finally diagnosed a corneal abrasion, but at that point his eye was so swollen that he could hardly see, and they told him he’ll have to put eye drops in his eye every day for the rest of his life.
The family is considering a law suit against the Urgent care place that originally diagnosed conjunctivitis.
And years ago I fell and dislocated my elbow, ruptured an elbow ligament and fractured a bone while walking my dog on a hillside in the dark. At least I had a story behind the injury. When in physical therapy I met people with worse injuries from slipping on water on their kitchen floor or having a box of files fall on them from an office shelf.
My own ER ocular episode was from doing bodywork on a rusty fender. I was quite careful to wear good eye protection and my eye was fine after I wrapped up for the day.
I didn’t wear eye protection in the shower afterwards, when I washed a large fleck of rust into my eyeball while shampooing. Which lodged at the edge of the cornea.
Took an ER visit to remove some of the rust, but some if it remained in the tissue and needed a next-day (Sunday) visit to the on-call ophthalmologist to anesthetize, dig out with some kind of a pointy tool, and prescribe antibiotic drops.
So I had that going for me. I had a pink scar at the edge of my cornea for 30 years after that.
In 2014, during an uncharacteristically warm January 2nd, I went out to install an ultrasonic animal repeller on the deck on the side of the house* to hopefully drive away the feral cat family that was living under it.
I had to go inside for some reason- get a tool I think, and while stepping down the rickety steps to the backyard, they started to wobble pretty hard, so I jumped off, thinking that was the better choice than just falling off the stairs.
I was very wrong. I landed just right on my right leg, and felt my patellar tendon tear off the kneecap. Couldn’t straighten my knee out, couldn’t really get up except to a sitting position, and didn’t really want to drag myself/crawl through the feral cat crap minefield I’d somehow landed in without actually landing ON any crap. So I yelled, texted, called, etc… until my wife heard, and long story short, I ended up in the ER, and the next day ended up with reconstructive surgery on the patellar tendon. About four months of PT later, I was up and walking with no problem, and almost eleven years later, I’m doing fine - no pain, no ROM issues, etc… just a fairly ugly scar.
We’re pretty sure our house was some kind of swinger orgy-pit back in the day, long before we bought it. At some point, the master bedroom and adjacent bedroom had the walls knocked out, there was deck on the side of the house with high privacy fences, a locking gate, and a hot tub, with French doors that opened to deck from the double-size bedroom, and there was all sorts of cabling and mounts for TVs and sound systems throughout the house.
On Mothers Day ten years ago, my mother asked me to get a loaf of bread on my way over for lunch. I stopped at a small grocery store. As I got out of the car, I saw two men walking in my direction. My purse had been snatched a couple weeks before so I was clutching my purse and nervously watching them. And tripped over the parking barrier in front of my car. I landed flat on my face with my left arm underneath me. The men, of course, rushed to my aid.
When I got to the ER, I was the only patient there. I was immediately tended to. I had a large contusion on my forehead and had fractured my left elbow. As I left, I said something to the nurse about how I didn’t think a holiday would be so quiet and she said “Oh, it’s early. The drinking and fighting haven’t started yet.” Lucky me.
