You read well. I recently had the (dis)pleasure of being on the receiving end of a bit at the doctor’s office. And yes, the exercise was the cure, not the food!

Here’s the story…

I had a rare weekend off last month and used it to make some headway restoring a 1963 Corvette Split Window. I’m still in the disassembly process, so a lot of the time is spent removing and cleaning parts. dirty. This involves first a soak in a parts cleaner and then usually some rough polishing with a wire wheel on my bench grinder. Now wire wheel grinders can be really nasty as the individual wires will sometimes break loose and fly towards you at dangerous speed. Think of little needle-shaped bullets.

So I always wear safety glasses. It’s something that has been ingrained in me since my teens when I helped my father and my uncles in the garage. Those were the days of woodworking-style glasses. You know, the really ugly ones that are more like snorkel masks? Regardless, the safety glass industry has made huge 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 rod on my day off. But it was not enough.

The problem with those cool looking glasses/glasses is that they don’t fit the face well. They are better than standard glasses, but still leave spaces, both above and below. And that space below is the path a stray metal sliver took to plunge 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 wind storm. I kept working on the Corvette and didn’t think much of it that night.

The next morning when I woke up, my eye still hurt. Again, just the feeling that there was a little spec there and it wouldn’t come out. Or I thought maybe I just scratched my cornea and it would heal. The human eye heals extremely quickly.

I go to the doctor

But two days later the bread was no less. My wife looked closely with a magnifying glass and was able to see the spec. She couldn’t tell what it was, but it seemed to be stuck to the actual cornea of ​​my eye, not just floating. Of course it was Saturday so I reluctantly made my way to Urgent Care to sit in an uncomfortable chair for 2 hours.

When the doctor finally got to me and looked into my eye with his slit light, it only took him 15 seconds to guess what happened. He said that 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 actually melted and stayed there. That’s why normal tears and eye drops don’t budge.

Then the fun begins. He puts a drop in my eye that tells it. This is a strange feeling I can tell you. He leaves the room (probably to remove another splinter from the next guy’s eye) and returns after the blob has had a chance to do his job. He then he turns off the lights and uses this device to keep my eye open. It looked like a holdover from medieval times. Then the doctor brings out his tray of spikes, needles, and other sharp, shiny instruments. He chooses the sharpest one and approaches my eye with it.

OK, at this point I’m still calm… about everything. At first I thought there was no way I could stop my eye from twitching as he brought the needle-sharp beak closer. But the numbing drops actually worked to counteract my natural blinking reaction. Well that and the device praying for my eyelids to open. So he starts poking at the sliver of metal. Every time I would try to get it out my vision would change and blur as the needle rotated my eyeball!

Finally he 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 frame had been in my eye long enough for it to start to rust. Through a magnifying mirror he let me look at my left eye with my 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 wasn’t an option. So, do you know how they remove rust from your eye? They pierce it!

Drilling is a small hand job. It reminds me of the drill the dentist uses, which of course doesn’t help my mood right now. The doctors tell me to relax (yeah right!) and then they start drilling my eye. What I learned later is that it’s more like grinding, not drilling. The idea is to grind/drill out all the areas where the rust has spread. Once the toxin is removed, your eye heals over the spot where they were pierced. Basically, it’s the lesser of two evils. The drill does damage, but it’s damage you can recover from. Leaving the rust there would do more damage as it spread.

Everything went well, but definitely not something I want to repeat. So now when I’m working on preparing my Corvette for sale or anything else in the garage that has the potential to fly parts, I wear a full face shield. I still wear my cool looking safety glasses just because it’s a habit, but I have a full face shield by the grinder that I can put over the safety glasses. You should also consider it if you spend any time in the garage. Your eyes aren’t exactly replaceable!