[Blown353]

I've had metal chips in the eye once. I learned to wear glasses/faceshields after that. Luckily no permanent damage.

However, I've also had worse-- several years ago while using a bottle of super-thin CA (superglue) to glue some tires for my R/C car I had a nozzle clog while squeezing the bottle which caused a high-velocity stream of CA to shoot up into my, you guessed it, left eye. Not only did it chemically burn but when CA cures it exotherms (gets hot) and further burned my eye and eyelid. That was about the most painful thing I've ever felt. That, and my eye was now stuck shut and burning!

Went to the ER, they had to cut my eyelashes off and I had to endure the pain of slowly "peeling" my eyelids apart and off my cornea. I then had the eye irrigated for over an hour, the usual dye/scope test (which showed quite a bit of burn damage to the cornea, not to mention the superglue residue). Had to use numbing eyedrops for a few days because of the pain, but within a month or so it recovered to 100% of the visual acuity I had before the accident.

Needless to say I now wear safety glasses when doing anything that could even be POTENTIALLY dangerous... the superglue thing was a 1 in a million freak accident and I learned that 1 time can really, really hurt.

I still have a very small "dark" spot in my right eye; very noticeable if I'm looking at a bright white wall-- it will look like there's a tiny dab of black paint on it, but the spot will move as I move my eye around. I noticed this "spot" just about an hour after rubbing my right eye with a dirty hand (duh... me smart.) I was convinced I ground something into my cornea, but I've had two opthamologists look at it and they both diagnosed it as a vitreous opacity or "floater." I still don't totally buy this explanation as the spot appeared just after rubbing my eye with a dirty hand. Wish I could get rid of it. My brain has *mostly* tuned it out, but in all-white or very light colored surroundings it's quite annoying.

Troy