Eye Eye

 
During my nursing career, I have had to deal with most kinds of wounds of one type or another. I am, however, not a fan of ophthalmic issues. 
This stems from two situations .The first was that I had to once deal with a patient with a prosthetic eye, nose and upper lip and I remember very will how I had to squint like Clarence the cross eyed lion every time I had to help clean the cavity beneath the prosthetics.
I think I would have thrown up if I had " looked" that closely
The second " eye" phobia.....is a relic of my cinema loving childhood.
Can everyone remember the scene in The Birds where Jessica Tandy discovers her farmer neighbour with his eyes pecked out?
I scared the shit out of me when I was a pre teen
Mr Hitchcock would have been tickled pink to have traumatised a young a Welsh boy for life!


This afternoon, on one of the hottest days of the year , I have been galloping around the field like a loon in order to catch a wounded hen. She has an incredibly swollen eye, which needed attention and so after a dose of antibiotics, and in full view of some quietly hysterical dogs, I wrapped the hen in a dinosaur dog blanket and bathed her eye with some sterile warm water at the kitchen sink.
I did squint just a little as I dabbed away.

32 comments:

  1. Poor hen.

    In these kinds of things, I find that gritting my teeth helps. Of course, I've had to have quite a lot of dental work to correct what THAT caused.

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  2. Anonymous4:41 pm

    Poor little thing...I hope you can clear it up for her.

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  3. Oh she does have a swollen eye. Bless you for doing this although it's difficult for you! xx

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  4. Poor hen! I'm sure she'll recover well even if you have to squint to give her the care she needs! Bless!
    My first encounter with an artificial eye was a bit like putting the triangle into the square hole.......having remove the AE, rinsing it first under the tap then cleansing with saline solution,I cleaned the eye socket with saline solution and then put the AE back in..... upside down, so the poor chap was looking to outer left instead of straight ahead! I immediately told him and he said whip it out and put it back in, you're not the first to get in upside down!

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  5. Hope she heals soon, John.

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  6. I know what you mean about the whole 'eye thing'. I cannot look at anything on youtube that deals with eye injuries/surgeries. A couple of years ago I accidentally got some cleaner in my eye and a bubble formed on my eyeball! I almost panicked.

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  7. poor girl; hope you can make her better, john.

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  8. That picture was pretty horrific John. Hope you are not getting violent thunderstorms down there.

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  9. P's brother got hit in the eye by a sugar-beet fork when he was 8. He lost his eye. It changed a lot of things in his family.

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  10. Yes ~ anything but eyes for me too. I was fearful of marauding birds after the movie too.

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  11. A young guest at my home got a gaping flesh wound from a bicycle crash. I bound it with a wet washcloth, each of us saying to the other, "Don't look." Then we had to wait at the hospital until her mother could be located, two hours later, as I had no authority to authorize even treatment for shock. The scar on her leg is grey to this day, from all the road she picked up in the cut.

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  12. Seeing The Birds put me off birds for the rest of my life. I've never been bothered by a procedure except once: staples in the head. I felt a little sick. I've never had to deal with prostheses such as you took care of, though. That might bother me.

    Love,
    Janie

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  13. Every summer we watch The Birds, Jaws and Jurassic Park and scare ourselves silly!
    Jenny

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  14. I worked with a guy with a false eye once. As much of the socket had been damaged too, it was rather a large prosthetic, resembling a fried eye I thought. But the one that really turned me was the guy who picked his nose away(really) and had a false nose hung on glasses similar to those in Christmas crackers. When he pushed them aside (to pick his nose) there was a gaping hole !

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  15. Poor girl....bet that smarts! When your ship comes in you can hire a resident Vet! But then again you do an excellent job.

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  16. A relative of mine had eye cancer and had to have his eye removed. He absolutely refused to have an artificial eye and instead chose to have a black eye patch over the cavity. It was certainly a sure-fire conversation-starter.

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  17. I wound up as a nurse in opthamology (they have a better shift pattern, not due to a love of eyeballs).

    I remember one of my first patients on a surgical ward as a student. He loved to pop his artificial eye out just as a student would walk and exclaim "it's just fell out". Put me off eyeballs for a while.

    It's eye infections that do me in.

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  18. Bless her heart, as we say here in the South.

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  19. I blame Hitchcock's "Birds" for my lifelong fear of birds inside the house. Birds outside (where they should be!) = no problem. Wild birds that have blundered inside = screaming panic and collapse of stout party. I don't even like budgies much.

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  20. You seem to have more of your fair share of wounded.

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  21. I once stood under the loft hatch supervising a man putting away the Christmas decorations, as women do. A bit of the glass from the fibre stuff used in lofts fell into my eye and lodged into the actual eyeball. I had to go to hospital and put my head in a clamp while they got it out with a cotton bud. They squeezed a liquid anaesthetic in first, didnt feel a thing. It was such a relief I can tell you. I have never " supervised" since.

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  22. not until you shared these pictures with me... thanks.

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  23. She is so lucky to have you to care for her.

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  24. You have a good heart, John, even if you are traumatized.

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  25. Ouch! Eye injuries and punctures are terrible every time. Sending healing thoughts.

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  26. I think simply having chickens and all their wounded, pus filled, shitty arsed little ways, not to mention occasionally their dead bodies has already toughened me up no end. From townie to country girl eh , it's a steep and regularly gut churning journey.

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