*****DISCLAIMER: THE PICTURES BELOW WILL LIKELY GROSS YOU OUT BEYOND BELIEF. IF YOU ARE AT ALL QUIRKY ABOUT YOUR EYES AND ARE FREAKED OUT BY WEIRD EYE STUFF, DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND SKIP THIS POST. THANKS, MANAGEMENT*****
so, i haven't had a Freaky Eye post in a while. brooke said i had to post about my patient today, so here goes:
16yoBM at Roebuck today. i had seen him last week for a full eye exam, and he was back today for a first time contact lens fitting. well, this young man was very motivated to wear contacts (because he hates his glasses), but he was scared of letting me put contacts in his eyes...a common occurrence. i could tell he was apprehensive, so i explained how easy it would be and how i would not hurt him, etc. so everytime i would try to put the lens on his eyes, he would squeeze his eyes so tight that i couldn't hold his eyelids open. and i'm pretty good at holding people's eyelids open. :) i would stop, explain to him that when he squeezes his eyes it makes it really difficult to put the lens on successfully, and then try again. after 15 minutes of coercing him to NOT squeeze his eyes, i finally got both lenses on. his vision was great with them....they fit well....they were comfortable...everything was going great.
so i take him to our contact lens training room to start practicing how to take the lenses out and put them in properly. our office manager helped teach him how to do that and care for his lenses. in the meantime, i go check a few more patients. right as i am about to go in with another patient, i hear a blood-curdling scream coming from the contact lens room, followed by our office manager screaming "DR. WILLIAMS!!! DR. WILLIAMS!!! DR. WILLIAMS!!!" i rush into the room, thinking he had accidentally scratched his eye while trying to take his contact out. instead, i saw something like this:
it wasn't EXACTLY like this picture. it was only his left eye. i calmed him down, got him to sit back down and relax, and the eye went back into his orbit like it should be.
for all you nerds out there, here's what happened. remember i told you he would squeeze his eyes? well, as he was trying to put his contacts in, he pulled his eyelids far apart to insert the contact. as he went to put the lens on his eye, he squeezed his eyes, trying to shut his eyelids while holding them open. funny, right? that internal pressure he exerted temporarily pushed his globe forward a few millimeters. once he calmed down, he relieved that pressure, and the globe retropulsed back into it's normal position.
and here's the funny part: he actually put the contact on his eye right before it popped forward! once he touched the lens to his eye, he squeezed so hard that it popped the eye forward. but he got it on! :)
that was the first time i've had to deal with a patient doing this. fortunately, i didn't have to physically push the eye back in. i've had a few of my classmates have to deal with that already.
