Middle-of-the-night mishaps can happen when you're groggy and not quite awake yet. But one very unfortunate mistake almost cost a Michigan woman her eyesight. Yacedrah Williams woke up on Thursday with dry eyes and wanted to take her contacts out. So she searched her purse for her eye drops and put a large drop in her eye.
But as it turned out, the small container wasn't the eye drops at all. It was a fast-acting nail glue that Yacedrah carries with her in case she breaks a nail. Within seconds her eye was completely glued shut.
Frantic, she ran into the bathroom and starting splashing water in her eye and trying to pry her eyelids apart, but they wouldn't budge.
"I was like, 'Oh my goodness!'" she recalled. "It dropped in my eye and I tried to wipe it away." Of course, the glue was just doing its job, and no amount of wiping it away would work. Neither would flushing it with water or trying to pry her eyelids apart.
"It sealed my eyes shut," she said. "I just started throwing cold water, and I was trying to pull my eyes apart but couldn't."
"It was completely shut," she added.
Yacedrah's husband called 911. She rushed to the hospital, and fortunately doctors were able to get her eyelids apart. They removed the contact lens, which was encrusted with glue. She lost some of her eyelashes, but her vision was not impacted.
Yacedrah was definitely lucky, because the situation could've been way worse. Doctors told her that the contact is actually what saved her sight, which makes sense given it was acting as a kind of protective layer. Still, the experience has to be so frightening.
Yacedrah says that after the incident, she won't keep nail glue in her purse, and in fact she might be finished with nail glue altogether. "I don't think I'll even have nail glue anymore," she said.
We don't blame her.
While it's certainly a freak accident, apparently it's one that happens! Ophthalmologist George Williams says Yacedrah is not the first person to make this terrible error. He also said that dumping water into her eye and attempting to flush it out was the exact right thing to do, and that any time something foreign goes in your eye, that is precisely what you should do.
"You'll make a mess, but you might save your vision," he said.
