Woman accidently sticks eyes with toxic glue

Bournemouth, April 3: In a bizzare incident, a woman mistook a bottle of nail fixer for eye drops and poured some drops into her eyes. Later, she was unable to open her eyes as her eyelashes got stuck together.

Paula Griffin, 29, suffered the agony for eight long hours as doctors tried different ways of countering the hazardous sticky liquid. Eventually, her eyelashes had to be cut off.

Paula, a company secretary of Branksome Wood Road, Westbourne, said she woke up with blurred vision and immediately reached out for eye drops.

In her confusion, somehow, Paula picked up the wrong bottle from the bathroom cabinet, which turned out to be the nail glue. It was lying right next to an identical same-sized bottle of eye drops, she said.

As soon as the nail glue touched her eye, Paula knew something was wrong. She tried to dodge it but with no success as the sticky liquid bonds the skin in seconds. “It was really thick and gloopy - not like eye drops at all.

“It was burning so much it was my natural instinct to shut my eye. But as soon as I did, my eyelashes stuck fast,” Paula said. “I couldn’t open my eye again. I was terrified I’d done permanent damage.”

However, she did enough to keep the nail glue from hitting the center of the eye. “And doctors told me later that it saved me from permanent damage.”

Paula’s father quickly rushed her to Poole Hospital, where doctors gave her paraffin to dissolve the glue, but it did not work.

“By the afternoon, nothing had really happened and I was in still in a lot of pain,” she said. “I could feel something scratching my eyeball and I was so scared it was cutting me. I was panicking about losing my sight.”

Eventually the eye specialists at Royal Bournemouth Hospital decided to cut off her eyelashes and force the eye open.

Paula has suffered a cut across her eyeball. Whether it is a lasting damage or not, is yet to be disclosed to her.

Incidents like this do not happen everyday, and Paula insists it was only an accident and not an unintelligent act. “I would hate people to think I’m just some dumb blonde, because I’m not. It was a nasty accident, and it could have happened to anyone,” she said.