You read well. I recently had the (un) pleasure of being on the receiving end of a drill bit in the doctor’s office. And yes, exercise was the cure, not the ailment!
This is the story …
I had a rare weekday off last month and took advantage of it to make some headway in restoring a 1963 Corvette Split Window. I’m still in the teardown process, much of the time is spent removing and cleaning dirty parts. . This involves first a dip in a parts cleaner and then usually a generous polish with a wire wheel on my bench grinder. Now wire wheel grinders can be really nasty as individual cables sometimes come loose and fly towards you with dangerous speed. Think of little needle-shaped bullets.
That is why I always wear safety glasses. It’s something that has been ingrained in me since my teens helping my dad and uncles in the garage. Those were the days of woodworking style glasses. You know, the really ugly ones that look the most like snorkel masks? Regardless, the safety glass industry has made great strides in fashion since then and many safety glasses now look more like cool sunglasses. So that’s what I was wearing while polishing a rusty Corvette tie bar on my day off. But it was not enough.
The problem with those cool goggles / glasses is that they don’t fit the face. They are better than standard glasses, but still leave gaps, both above and below. And that space below is the path that a lost metal splinter took to rush into my left eye. I felt it, of course, but it was a very small particle and it bothered me no more than a piece of sand or dirt from a windstorm. I kept working on the Corvette and didn’t think much more about it that night.
The next morning when I woke up my eye still hurt. Again, just the feeling that a little spec was there and wouldn’t come out. Or I thought maybe I had just scratched my cornea and it would heal. The human eye heals extremely quickly.
I’m going to the doctor
But two days later, the pain did not subside. By having my wife look closely with a magnifying glass, she was able to see the specification. I couldn’t tell what it was, but it seemed stuck in the actual cornea of my eye, not just floating. Of course this was Saturday so I reluctantly headed to the Urgent Care Center to sit in an uncomfortable chair for 2 hours.
When the doctor finally came to me and looked into my eye with his slit light, it only took him 15 seconds to guess what happened. He said he sees it quite often. The little sliver of metal was hot when it came off the grinding wheel, so when it hit my eye it melted and stuck there. This is why normal tears and eye drops were not moving.
Then the fun begins. He puts a drop in my eye that makes it numb. This is a strange feeling that I can tell you. He leaves the room (probably to get another splinter out of the next boy’s eye) and comes back after the gout has had a chance to do its job. Then turn off the lights and use this device to keep my eye open. It looked like a holdover from medieval times. The doctor then takes out his tray of spikes, needles, and other sharp, shiny instruments. Pick the sharpest one and get close to my eye with it.
Okay, at this point I’m still calm … mostly. At first I thought there was no way I could stop my eye from flinching as he brought the needle sharp beak closer. But the numbing drops really worked to counteract my natural blinking reaction. Well, that and the device that opened my eyelids. Then it begins to touch the metal splinter. Every time I tried to pull it out, my vision would change and blur when the needle rotated my eyeball!
He finally came out and I breathed a sigh of relief that the worst was over. But no, that was not the case.
The dreaded EYE DRILL!
The doctor explained that the metal spec had been in my eye long enough for it to actually start to rust. Through a magnifying mirror he let me look into his left eye with his right. In fact, a slightly darkened halo could be seen on my cornea where the spec had just been. And apparently rust is toxic to the cornea, so letting it fix itself was not an option. So do you know how they get rust out of your eyes? They pierce it!
The drill is a little manual work. It reminds me of the drill the dentist uses, which of course doesn’t help my mood at the moment. Doctors tell me to relax (yeah right!) And then they start to pierce my eye. What I learned later is that it is more like polishing, not drilling. The idea is to grind / drill all the areas where the rust has spread. Once the toxin is removed, the eye heals over the spot where it was pierced. Basically, it is the lesser of two evils. The drill does damage, but it is damage that you can recover from. Leaving the rust there would do more damage as it spread.
Everything went well, but it is definitely not something I want to repeat. So now when I work on preparing my Corvette for sale or anything else in the garage that has the potential to blow up parts, I wear a full face shield. I still wear my good looking safety glasses just because it’s a habit, but I have a full face shield next to the grinder that I can put over the safety glasses. You should also consider this if you spend any time in the garage. Your eyes are not exactly replaceable!
