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Comment by bonafidehan | Hacker News Reader

How can you tell that you have a corneal abrasion?

It's can be quite unpleasant. The test for it is very straight forward - eye drops and someone looks into your eye. Wear goggles when grinding steel and even if you do, take care when washing your face afterwards. Steel stuck in your cornea, cutting your eyelid when blinking is terrible.

> Wear goggles when grinding steel and even if you do, take care when washing your face afterwards.

Go one further: Goggles and a face shield, minimum. Why?

Have you ever had a right-angle grinder wheel explode? I have (it was actually a cut-off wheel). At the time I wasn't wearing even goggles, just my eye glasses. Amazingly, nothing hit me in the face, but I do remember hearing the part ricochet around my friend's shop (fortunately, I was the only one in it at the time).

Unfortunately, a piece hit my knuckle - extremely hard; I thought I had lost my finger, but amazingly not (oh, I wasn't wearing gloves, either).

I should've got stitches, but my friend took care of it; we washed it out, wrapped it up, then he gave me a percocet to take the edge off the pain. I remember at one point we looked at it after it had been a few hours, to see if I could still move it; I started to flex it, and had a small Monty Python flesh-wound moment (seriously, it made me laugh it was so cliche looking - though completely real); but I could move it. All's good today, still typing with it!

Basically me doing everything wrong (it really was all my fault, I shouldn't have been handling that equipment - I think I was also wearing shorts, a t-shirt and open-toe sandals at the time - a total DERP moment, but that's all it took), I knew better even then, but I was stupid that day. Faster than you can blink, bam, and there it was.

I take a lot more precautions now before I handle spinning cutting/grinding shit moving at 20k RPM (though I am still not a fan of my friend's open-guard 9 inch grinder - the thing will grind anything off anything, but holy hell is it dangerous to use - if that thing let loose, no amount of safety equipment will save you).

Oh - and if you are arc welding, don't wear a white shirt; reflection of the arc can bounce off inside your helmet, and still cause "welder's blindness" - which is basically a nice sunburn to the cornea; generally not a permanent thing, but hurts like hell for a long while.

Also, use a guard on angle grinders! And keep it in between you and the work! A man was killed by an exploding cutting disk at a company I used to work at. Shrapnel lodged in his chest, he took the guard off to get at something more easily.

Yes. It's a tradesman hack to buy a 115mm grinder (it's cheap), take off the guard and fit 125mm disks. People have been killed here recently by broken bits firing out. Cutting disks are so thin that a minor course correction can easily break them. Someone I know had a labourer use a grinder with a broken on off switch. One day the guy put it under his arm and plugged it in, and it cut through artery, vein and nerve. A year later and he is just starting part time work.

Paradoxically it's harder to tell when you have your lenses on. They're a barrier between the surface of the cornea and the inner eye lid so they actually mask the pain you might feel without them.

Although I wear extended wear lenses which are FDA approved to stay in for 30 continuous days my optometrist has emphasized that they need to come out every week for an evening so that you can evaluate the condition of your eyes and how your cornea is feeling. It only takes a few days to develop an abrasion that as folks have noted is very painful.

As long as I can wear lenses overnight I'm never going to try LASIX. Just too many people that run into issues with dry eyes, halos and poor night vision. Since I'd still have to wear reading glasses I don't even see the point - with my multifocal lenses I almost never wear glasses anymore for reading even.

I've been wearing contacts for over 20 years (started in HS) and have never had a corneal abrasion. With a prescription of -8.5, I hate the tunnel-vision effect glasses give me, so I wear my contacts pretty much all the time (I don't sleep in them, however).

A coworker came into work one day with a really ugly looking right eye (red, tearing, etc.) Turns out he got whacked in the face by a tree branch on his way in (he rode his bicycle to work). He was even wearing glasses but apparently that didn't protect his eye (enough). He lasted about an hour before he left to go see his eye doc who diagnosed him with a corneal abrasion. Guy was in pain for weeks.

So my assessment is that corenal abrasions are caused by 'bad luck.'

I sleep in mine, except for once a week when I take them out to disinfect overnight or replace (I have 2-week disposables). I've had a mix of opinions from doctors on this. My current doctor says it's fine if my eyes aren't getting dry/irritated (in which case I should take them out), though I've had past doctors who were against it.

The tradeoff in the current doctor's opinion is that taking them out nightly reduces infection risk theoretically, through nightly disinfection, better access to the eye surface for your immune system, and lower risk of corneal abrasions. But handling the contacts daily for removal/reinsertion provides a new route for infection, as a lot of infections are introduced by fingers, lens cases, etc. So the added handling might offset the benefits of nightly removal enough to make it a net loss, if you're one of the people for whom sleeping in contacts doesn't produce dry eyes or irritation. Real-world data seems not good enough to compare the magnitude of those two effects.

An anecdotal word of warning: I wore bi-weekly disposables as well for quite a few years and would repeatedly sleep in them. Never had dry eyes or irritation, however after a few years I developed tiny capillaries growing in my eye (corneal neovascularization), as it turned out they were not getting enough oxygen.

Supposedly if they continue to grow I could lose my eyesight, and they won't actually go away even if I stopped wearing lenses.

Yeah, that's a good point. I've had that mentioned to me, but I get annual checkups, and have been told that they'd show up in the annual checkup if I were having that problem, at which point I could change my habits (it's not an acute condition that crops up in a month or something). Supposedly that complication has also gotten less common in the past 5-10 years as newer lens materials are much more oxygen-permeable than older ones were.

If you had one and you didn't know, I'd be amazed. In my experience, it is incredibly painful.

I caught my eye with the edge of a cardboard box. On the way to the hospital I had to drive into the sun. Both keeping my eye open or closed was painful.

The test they did was a couple of drops in my eye and a black-light. The end result was just a few days Vicodin script and after a couple days I was fine. The drugs didn't even reduce the pain from what I could tell. Luckily they made me tired so I slept for most of those days anyways.

Generally your eye becomes red, it hurts, and is sensitive to light. There are varying degrees of an abrasion though, and the severity of these symptoms may make the less severe versions harder to determine if it's an abrasion or something else.

I accidentally scratched my eye with a fingernail once.

Severe pain, eye constantly watering for a couple weeks.

Oh man, I had the same question because I got PRK and I didn't know whether or not my cornea is fully healed.

Since the pain stopped, that's that.

And everyone's stories are the same stuff as I felt PRK post-op.

Extreme pain in the eye that was just touched by an object. Pain that does not go away after a few minutes or an hour.

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