Woman glues eye shut for eight hours after mistaking nail fixer for eyedrops

Groping in the bathroom cabinet early one morning, her vision blurred by sleep, Paula Griffin grasped what she thought was her bottle of eye drops.

But instead she picked up an almost identical bottle of powerful nail glue and squirted it in her eye.

The blunder left her in agony and sealed her right eye shut. Relief only came eight hours later when doctors cut off her lashes and prised the eye open.

The glue could have caused permanent damage to Miss Griffin's sight. It is used by beauty professionals to fix false nails and carries a warning that it bonds skin within seconds.

'I was still really tired and I couldn't see very well, so I stumbled into the bathroom and picked the bottle off the shelf,' she said. 'As soon as I squeezed it, I knew something was wrong. It was really thick and gloopy - not like eye drops at all.

'I couldn't dodge the liquid completely. I managed to stop it hitting the centre of the eye, and doctors told me later that it saved me from permanent damage.

'It was agonising. It was burning so much it was my natural instinct to shut my eye. But as soon as I did, my eyelashes stuck fast. I was terrified I'd done permanent damage.'

Miss Griffin, a company secretary, was taken to Poole Hospital in Dorset by her father Ron, 55. Doctors gave her paraffin to help dissolve the glue.

But by the afternoon she was still in great pain and the paraffin had made no progress so she went to an eye specialist at Bournemouth Hospital.

'They told me I had three options left,' she said. 'I could leave it glued shut until it unglued itself naturally but that would almost certainly cause more damage. I could keep trying to treat it with the paraffin, or I could have all my eyelashes cut off to force the eye open.

'By then, I was so miserable it wasn't even a decision. I had them cut straight off.

'It was horrible to have no eyelashes, but I don't regret doing it.'

Miss Griffin, from Bournemouth, had to take a week off work and couldn't drive for a few days. She had a cut across her eyeball and now wears false eyelashes. She is still waiting to find out whether she has done any lasting damage.

Dr Simon Bell, consultant in emergency medicine at Poole Hospital, said: 'As long as the glue remains on the outside of the eye, the injury will be extremely painful but will only cause superficial damage.

'If it had gone into the middle of the eyeball, it is much more likely permanent damage would have been caused.'

Source : dailymail