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Comment by jules | Hacker News Reader

Warning signals do reduce damage though: if you hadn't gotten the warning then maybe you would have continued burning your eye. I certainly would have continued looking at the UV light if I hadn't felt any pain.

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It was a visible-wavelength laser, so I would've known there was a problem as soon as it hit my retina, even without the audible click and the sudden and disquietingly misplaced feeling of having been kicked pretty hard in the nuts. But I take your meaning.

(And I own a pair of wavelength-matched laser goggles now, as should you if you're going to do anything at all with a laser and any kind of focusing optics. Carelessly enough handled, even a 5mW pointer beam can pose a real risk. Don't make the same mistake I did!)

Laser to the eye causes testicle pain?

Probably "overwhelming" pain. Where you almost complete loss of rationality, a torrent of sensation that blocks out all other thought and sensation - vision narrows to a point, sound becomes choppy and discordant, limbs feel far away or even absent (no, I don't mean the one that's potentially chopped off or something ;) , the other ones)

Oh, it wasn't anywhere near that threshold! (Although it was well over that for swearing the air blue.) See my sibling comment to yours; I just meant that the nature of the sensation was almost identical to that produced by a shot to the area, just in my head instead of my belly - and, yes, that really does feel as weird as it sounds like it would.

Oddly enough, yes! Not in the same area, obviously. But if you recall the last time you caught a blow to the business, then imagine how that'd feel in your head instead of your belly, that'll give you a decent idea of what it was like. I don't know what else would, short of actually replicating the injury; I've had enough shiners to know what that's like, and while it's not at all pleasant, I'd probably choose it over another laser burn if I weren't given the option of declining both.

Fascinating though it was, I have to say I found the experience with very little to recommend it, not least because it disquiets to realize that the click you've just heard, conducted through the bone and tissue of your head, was produced by a small volume of fluid inside your eyeball suddenly boiling.

Beautiful language.

It feels like the kind of pain when you injure your testicles, but you feel it in your eyes. It is similar to the kind of pain you feel when you press your thumb and index finger between the bones in your forearm (under your wrist).

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